


Shell Game

by andalucite



Category: James Bond (Craig movies), James Bond (Movies), James Bond - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magic, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Multi, Q is an outsider, Slow Burn, Trust Issues, Unreliable Narrator, adding tages as I go/god please help me tag I am so bad at it, ruthless Q, tbh so is Q, the 00-agents are beings of violence and chaos
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-09-22
Updated: 2018-10-06
Packaged: 2019-07-15 17:42:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 25,323
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16068086
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/andalucite/pseuds/andalucite
Summary: Q has made a lot of promises to a lot of people and he only intends to keep one of them.\\With M's death and the preceding events, MI6 is in chaos and the 00-agents are loose in the world. The new Quartermaster claims he can find and hold their leashes, if he is allowed.Which seems like a spectacularly bad idea, with what little MI6 knows of the Quartermaster.





	1. Prologue: Sacrifice

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Only_1_Truth](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Only_1_Truth/gifts).



> **shell game** _(ˈSHel ˌɡām/)_ : a game involving sleight of hand, in which three inverted cups or nutshells are moved about, and contestants must spot which is the one with a pea or other object underneath.
> 
> alternatively: a deceptive and evasive action or ploy, especially a political one.

M was dying. She had pressed her bundled-up jacket to the stab wound in her abdomen on reflex alone; it did little good stopping her from bleeding out when what was killing her was a perforated stomach lining. Gut wounds were a slow, miserable way to go, and she had exhausted all of her options besides suffering every bitter moment of it.

At least Silva—Tiago— _Silva_ lay dead at her feet.

The fucking safe house had been compromised from the start, M would bet her last breaths on it. The whole affair had been a fucking disaster, too much panic in the bureaucratic red-tape bound upper echelon of the British government—chickens with their heads cut off, every one. Too much—she coughed sharply on pain caught in her throat and for one hysterical moment thought she might vomit at the shockwaves of agony that sent through her, torn-open gut be damned—too much at stake beyond her own life, head of MI6 set aside entirely.

With so much more than M herself on the line, no one, not even her own damned people, had trusted her to make the right call.

Emotionally compromised, they said

Too personally involved in the case, they claimed.

Fuck her personally involved emotions, she hadn’t had a luxury like that since she stepped into the role of M and shed her own name like a snake’s skin, weakness that it was. Tiago had been a mistake she made early and Silva had been the devil come for his due, but her desire to handle it her way had nothing to do with covering her ass and everything to do with protecting MI6 and her agents.

Not necessarily in that order, but that was a sentiment for Olivia to keep well hidden from view and inappropriate for M to hold at all and if she was going to die in this shithole of a compromised safe house she was going to die as the fucking head of MI6 and not some woman.

Even if, thanks to the powerful concealing glamour on her and the safe house alike, MI6 would not find their precious head until she was already stiff and cold.

Another protection she’d bet her last breaths had been compromised with the start, considering how well it had fucking worked— which was to say not at fucking all for the wrong people and all too well on the right ones.

The right ones, for whom it had been deemed too risky not for M or themselves or anyone actually relevant but for _MI6_ and _England_ and _Queen and Country_ to be anywhere near the Silva debacle, who nonetheless would have been fucking right for the job because they were her agents, the heart and blood of MI6 even if the politicians had _fucking forgotten what that meant_ —

M was dying and nearly incandescent with rage at the sheer idiocy and ineptitude of the whole situation. She coughed again, curling around her bloodied jacket and moaning against the sensation of being stabbed all over again, truly a gift that kept on giving, and blacked out for a moment.

When M came to, it was with a curiously clear surprise that she was not dead, and not nearly enough surprise at the—she blinked hard a few times—at the raven perched on Silva’s dead face, one talon digging rhythmically into his eye. It looked up when the eye was a bloodied, pulped ruin and cawed loudly, sounding suspiciously like it was laughing.

“Took your bloody sweet time getting here,” Olivia ground out. The bottom of her lungs felt too close, breath barely making it to the end of her words. She glared at the raven and its antics, shooting for unimpressed but landing a bit short. Seeing Silva’s corpse desecrated was a special kind of pleasure.

“You are dying.” The raven stated, hopping off Silva’s ruined face and onto her shin.

Feeling this was a bit too obvious to dignify with a response, M leveled a flat stare at the bird.

It ruffled its feathers, cawing laughter again, callous in its humour—but, as it was not wrong about her inevitable death, it didn’t seem to matter much. Too little, too late for it to be here, after all. She wondered if the glamour hiding her from MI6 had worked on the raven as well, or if it had actually taken its sweet time, lacking her strictly mortal sense of urgency.

“Olivia, olive-branch, I will not save you but I will grant your dying wish, if you have one,” it crooned her name, long fallen out of use and hidden away, dipping its head to rub its beak in her blood, sounding at last familiar and fond and she was smiling despite herself, despite her oncoming death.

“ _Won’t_ save me, you old rat-bastard?” M shook her head, moving her hand away from the open wound in her abdomen in silent offering. It was the way of things, after all, and life’s blood was deeply sacred. She had lost a great deal in her life, but not that. Never that. “Can’t, you mean, even you can’t argue with death.”

“You are the last of you line,” the raven sounded a bit odd—nearly apologetic, though Olivia noted that did not stop it from dipping its beak more deeply into her blood and body-turned-offering. There were tiny pinpricks of light like stars in its eyes that seemed to beat along with her own sluggish pulse, growing in intensity as her own faded.

She blinked slowly, not precisely following, not precisely unaware of what it meant, cryptic thing that it was. She had no children, too bound up with first military service and then MI6, with some awfully shady interludes, and no relatives she knew of—orphans really did make the best recruits in her line of work—but had maybe not really thought it through in these terms before. So much of her life had been sacrificed to something greater, she hadn’t considered the older sacrifices that might have taken precedent even while keeping what little of her family tradition she could remember.

“You’re still here,” was what she ended up responding with, not entirely certain what she meant by that, though the raven cawed laughter at her again so it must have understood.

“Even last, even dying, I hold with those who belong to me,” it told her haughtily, beak dripping with blood and held high in the air.

Olivia huffed out a sorry excuse for a laugh, lifting her hand to scratch its feathered chest lightly. “We have that in common,” she said, thinking of MI6 and what was hidden within it.

The raven ruffled its feathers out so that her fingers slipped into the downy underlayer and bit at her knuckles fondly. “Olivia, olive-branch, what do you think belonging to me means? Even last, even dying, you hold with those who belong to you.” It placed unusual weight on _those who belong to you_ and M had already been thinking of her agents scattered throughout the world and about to be left adrift in the wake of her death, anchorless, and now the raven was all but naming them.

Tricky bastard to her end, when she had thought them all past saving as soon as she had been past saving. It was how these things worked, after all, one of the reasons she was here against her will in the first place. M, head of MI6 and hand that held the leash of the deadliest beings in the world, with no heir, no protégé able to do what she had been doing for decades.

Tricky bastard, offering not to save her life but giving her the chance to cash in on an entire bloodline’s divine favour all at once if she could just—focus enough on what it was saying, had been saying this whole time.

Death and rage returned to combine into a single moment of stunning clarity in Olivia’s mind, a star like those that had near taken over the raven’s once-dark eyes. She leaned forward with labored panting, hands white-knuckled against the wall, hissing bloodied breath out between bared teeth.

“Protect my fucking agents.”

 

When MI6 broke the glamour hiding the safe-turned-slaughterhouse, M was dead, both of Silva’s eyes had been plucked out, and a murder of ravens circled deafeningly overhead, their raucous calls sounding like laughter and accusation both.


	2. Lean into the lies

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Think of this as a game of poker in which every person is cheating in a different way

“—are clearly too dangerous to be kept!” C shouted, Johann nodding in agreement a touch too emphatically. Moneypenny barely restrained herself from rolling her eyes, instead focusing on looking bored. Mallory—M—disapproved of the tactic as a power play, but even he had to admit it worked, especially in present company. Half of C’s overinflated ire was down to feeling ignored.

Every person in the room had considerable power at their fingertips, both in the literal magical sense and in the political field. Some simply wore it better than others; including, by Moneypenny’s calculation, herself, Mallory, R, and Mycroft. Harry carried it well but much of his power was ceremonial and hereditary—Moneypenny found it hard to include him in her group on principle alone. C and Johann were both useless, C bluster and bigotry and Johann an unfortunately elevated yes-man, if anyone asked her. She pretty specifically made sure no one ever did.

Mallory was fingering the material of his sling with his good hand, looking frustrated and a bit flat in the eyes. “Clearly nothing; MI6, I will remind you, is my agency, and these monsters, as you so crudely put it, are my best agents. They are meant to be dangerous. I will handle the situation.” The newly appointed M was a bit flat in the voice as well.

Moneypenny laid a silent bet with herself that C would not leave this meeting unscathed. A minor curse, at the least. Not Mallory’s specialty, of course, but something she was rather gifted at. And she was ever loyal. At Mycroft’s suspicious glance, she lifted her chin slightly in challenge. He claimed not to be telepathic, and was a dirty liar, not that anyone could prove it. He was a difficult man to prove anything about.

“Actually, I think you will find that I will handle the situation,” a new voice cut in smoothly. Moneypenny only barely did not leap like a cat, whirling in unison with Mallory and R to train the business end of her gun on the interloper.

The bloody impossible interloper. This room was warded against every known type of interference, used only for the direst of magical emergencies (to individual definitions of dire these days). There was no way for anyone to just—appear—

“Who are you?!” C’s eyes were bugged with fury and he had turned an interesting shade of red, his earlier ire snowballing into something that was frankly embarrassing. No self-control. Moneypenny wondered, not for the first time, how he had been appointed to the circle.

“I think that you may call me Gwyddien,” the stranger sounded faintly mocking, and when he jumped down from the bookshelf he had materialized on he landed far too lightly. “I am M’s replacement.”

Moneypenny nearly shot him then and there, but a sharp glance from Mallory stayed her hand. R, too, already took her cues from their new M. “We have a new M already,” she snapped. “Try again.”

Too-dark too-bright eyes flicked in her direction and she suppressed a shudder at their lack of humanity. Her bored mask was thoroughly shattered under his gaze and she grit her teeth against losing any more ground. It was faintly nauseating to maintain eye contact. The stranger—Gwyddien—appeared amused at her efforts.

“I have no interest in leading MI6,” Gwyddien shook his head, running his tongue over sharp teeth thoughtfully. “No. I am here to replace M as anchor and chain to your unbonded—as you say, agents.”

Mycroft cut across C and Johann’s indignant sputtering like a shark. “That is going to prove a problem for you. I will not allow them into the hands of one such as yourself.” He sounded bored and implacable, if a touch over-enunciated, as always and Moneypenny was seethingly jealous of his ability to do so.

“One such as myself?” Gwyddien asked as if astonished, inhuman eyes wide and fake, inhuman grin equally wide but quite real. It was no difficult step to imagine feathers trapped between them as if he had already caught and eaten the canary. “What do you mean? One such as myself, not quite human enough for you? Why? Is there not safety to be had in one who cannot lie? One with an understanding of these things that you will always lack? One who can certainly hold the leashes you lot so carelessly let slip?” His grin widened too much for his face and the effect was deeply unsettling. “Or one such as myself, who is fulfilling a powerful woman’s death command?”

Silence reigned for one brief, stunned moment.

R sucked a sharp breath in between her teeth and lowered her gun. She was brilliant with code and engineering alike but also Scottish in the most important of ways and knew perhaps better than the rest of them what a death command meant—especially one delivered to a being like Gwyddien.

Mycroft still looked bored and implacable, but Moneypenny would bet brass that he was as unsettled as the rest of them. She lowered her gun as well, but did not holster it as Mallory had—in his defense, he only had one hand to work with currently, and against this kind of being a free hand served better than a gun. If you were fast enough.

“Found our missing seals,” Moneypenny muttered. No one had considered that M—the old M—would have had the kind of pull necessary to issue a death command, but perhaps they should have. She always had played her cards devilishly close to her chest, enjoying the advantage playing up her shortcomings rather than her achievements gave her. Advantages that apparently included Gwyddien.

The safe house they had recovered her body from had been a slaughterhouse. In the chaos, it had been days too long before anyone with the right clearance had noticed that all thirteen of her seals had been missing, which was precisely the topic of this suddenly much more productive meeting. Gwyddien was not someone any one of them wanted to have hands on the seals, but at least they knew where they were. Worst case, it was seven to one; the seals could no doubt be reclaimed by force, though Moneypenny strongly preferred for it not to come to that. He reeked of otherworldly power.

Gwyddien nodded in acknowledgement. “I do have the seals, it is true, but I must correct you: they are not your seals, they are mine. On this, I am not able to deal. On other things…” he trailed off teasingly, flicking suddenly coy eyes around the room.

To the last man, they all straightened at the shockingly blatant opening he was giving them. One such as Gwyddien appeared to be did not give up so much so early. M’s death command must have packed one hell of a punch.

Mycroft smiled microscopically. “Well then. Let us deal.”

 

This is what Gwyddien wanted: control of the seals, all of them, and the agents.

This is what the circle wanted: control of Gwyddien, and through him, the agents.

It was rather unclear which side of the negotiations felt they would have to pay a steeper price to gain what they wanted.

 

Hours later, Gwyddien was beginning to let slip the first traces of anger and Mycroft was insufferably smug over it. It was rather helpful, actually, as Moneypenny spent all the energy she might have being afraid of Gwyddien on being annoyed with Mycroft instead. It did wonderful things for her ability to appear unflappable.

Mallory had asked R to take precise notes on the proceedings (technically the circle they formed were all equals; just as technically, Mallory was M and God to R and Moneypenny—it often got complex, and explained Johann) when it became clear that just being in the same room as Gwyddien was going to eventually send her into hysterics. Gwyddien himself was doing nothing to soothe R’s almost superstitious distrust of him and indeed seemed to be taking a sadistic delight in throwing his lack of humanity in their faces.

Moneypenny was keeping an eye on those notes: they were shaping up to be a rather beautifully complex binding that even one such as Gwyddien would have difficulty slipping free of. When focused and properly motivated by a likely well-justified fear, R was something of a technical magic terror. And remarkably politically adept; while Gwyddien was highly unlikely to agree to the binding, she thought even C would be pleased at the division of power on their side. Good on R.

“Enough!” Gwyddien finally snapped. “I will not subject myself to imprisonment, and you should know just as well as I that it does not work that way to begin. There is a reason Olivia held the seals as M and not some out-of-the-way nobody. If you insist on having me under MI6, I must be a part of it.” There was an unsettling writhing in the wood of the conference table under his fingertips that Moneypenny—and Mallory, she noticed—was specifically not looking at.

The men in the room all hemmed a bit, drawing back from the need to commit. Well, Mycroft did not draw back so much as remain where he was, entirely unswayed until it was clear where and how the dice would land.

Moneypenny and R exchanged a spontaneous glance of brilliant inspiration (Moneypenny) and heartfelt dread (R).

“Quartermaster.” Moneypenny silenced the muttering, and Gwyddien dropped his unearthly gaze on her like an anvil. It felt rather final. “Ours has just died, and it is a position both of power and… security in MI6.” She met Gwyddien’s eyes without flinching and continued pointedly, “Only if you think you are capable of performing the necessary duties, of course.

“I am more than capable of performing any duties I need,” Gwyddien replied with a stiff, strange inflection, as if he were telling the truth but not as he wanted, or perhaps not all of it.

Mycroft smiled microscopically again, possibly in reaction to the sourness in Gwyddien’s face at the blatant challenge. Moneypenny did not like it one bit.

C narrowed his eyes as if he were about to protest vehemently just as Mallory groaned and covered his face with his uninjured hand. R was transparently miserable with this idea, being second in command to any theoretical head of TSS, and it was likely their unified unhappiness that stilled C’s rant down to an uncertain air of victory. Heaven forbid he cooperate in any manner that appeared to tip the power balance out of his favour, Moneypenny thought uncharitably.

“Well, then,” she pressed her advantage in the silence lest C decide he should fill it after all, “I do believe the binding R has created will work optimally on you as Quartermaster. There is a certain edge to positions that come with names.”

Gwyddien failed to stifle a sharp breath in time, and the seven of them were once again united in the face of such careless weakness.

Quartermaster it was.

 

The binding R had created was indeed a thing of beauty. Gwyddien had flipped through her development notes in total (literally; even the pages turning made no sound) silence for thirty very long minutes while the seven of them stood at the far end of the room and conferred quietly over how they were going to proceed.

At the end of it, he had set the book down on the conference table with a heavy thump and consented to the binding with one minor change: that it be necessarily renegotiated at the end of a year and a day.

They had agreed after a short but vicious argument amongst themselves and hastened to move all the furniture in the room to the walls, then set to drawing the complex series of evolving geometric shapes on the floor around Gwyddien, who stood at the dead center of everyone and was choosing to look neutral as a statue after having made his extreme displeasure and grudging consent known.

It was a three-layer ritual with twenty-one parts, with each person responsible for one in each layer.

The first, laid around Gwyddien in chalk and oil and thread, bound him to a human body with human capacity for power and stripped him of his name along with his nature. It was expected that he would remain capable of performing the kind of wild magic his kind were known for, but only at a small scale, as they could not cut him from it entirely without killing him even were he willing to allow it. It took more energy than Moneypenny was expecting but locked in place around Gwyddien like a well-fitted glove, which seemed strange. There was no time to examine why, however, as each piece of the ritual flowed into the next.

The second, laid with chanting and bells and a clear, piercing whistle, bound him to each of the seven in the circle such that they might always know where he was and what he was doing. Gwyddien had disliked this binding the most, and fought their efforts like a trapped snake, though Moneypenny thought perhaps it was all instinctual, as he had agreed and couldn’t lie. When it took hold, the cacophony was abruptly ended with Gwyddien’s sharp hiss, hands cupped protectively over his ears.

The third, laid with ink and blood, bound him to the Quartermaster and MI6, promotion and imprisonment both. The hole left where his name had been was filled again with a role to play, and this more than anything was the keystone of the entire binding—locked into the Quartermaster, Gwyddien’s nature would slowly shift to more accurately fit his new name until, their thought was, he was truly on their side and would not fight the binding.

Until then, he could not escape by trickery; each layer entwined with the others, shifting and sharing purpose. He could not escape by brute force; twenty-one pieces held by seven in a circle would produce endless permutations in a metaphorical maze. He could not escape by treachery; if one of the seven fell to his wiles, six others could easily shoulder the burden, and while they were united against him in this ritual it was unlikely they would be so united in undoing the binding.

Moneypenny was quite proud of R, all in all. But even with all her cleverness and their cooperation, it was the old M’s death command that must have forced his cooperation—the entire situation was faintly absurd in its unlikelihood. She wished that they knew exactly what the command had been, rather than the inferences they had all drawn from Gwyddien’s mere presence and surrender to the binding, but a death command was spoken only once and never again.

C and Johann and Harry and even Mallory clearly viewed taming one such as Gwyddien as a triumph of magic. Mycroft, as ever, withheld judgement, and was likely not so ego-blind as to consider this a personal victory. R and Moneypenny, who really were quite good friends outside of everything, did not trust the new Quartermaster as far as they could throw him.

Which, actually, could be pretty far.

The new Quartermaster stood in the center of the circles a different man. He was hunched and slight and disheveled, hair a messy crow’s nest of utterly ordinary blacks and browns, eyes a perfectly human hazel, almost sickly pale, and very young. He looked as if a stiff wind could bowl him over without much afterthought.

When he gingerly lowered his hands from his ears, they were blunt and heavily pierced, with three seamless rings in one and four in the other—some aspect of the binding physically manifest. Moneypenny thought the locating portion likely, as the other two aspects were not as simple to represent. Their magic had even gone so far as to dress him in an amalgamation of ill-fitted office clothing, though she couldn’t remember what he had been wearing before.

A working done by seven people by necessity carried an element of randomness, but Moneypenny was honestly surprised by their results.

He was just… so… unimpressive.

“I think,” Q interrupted their staring stiffly, “that I will require glasses, if you please.” He was blinking deliberately and uncomfortably, Moneypenny noticed with a start, and looking around the room with a distinct expression of dismay.

Huh.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you look up 'unreliable narrator' in the dictionary, it's just this chapter. ~~Or it would be if Q was the narrator I now realize I stand by my statement as he's controlling the narrative anyways we'll get there~~
> 
> look it's just that if everyone believes that you cannot lie but you actually _can_ , who even is to say what the truth is? definitely not you, is what I'm saying
> 
> Having said that! if anything is unclear, let me know, just in case it is bad writing lack of clarity and not unreliable narrator lack of clarity. TBH I am way too close to this chapter to even know what it says any more, it has become meaningless
> 
> <33
> 
> (guess who decided they needed seven people in the circle and just DOESN'T CARE about the extra bodies at all? >.> eight people in a room is so many send help)


	3. Gamble with your life

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Even made as human as he can be, the Quartermaster enjoys playing games with people's lives.

“Dear 00-agents of MI6, if you would please return to headquarters at your earliest possible convenience for debriefing and reassignment,” Q muttered sarcastically, disdain evident in the irate set of his shoulders as he typed out a yet another mass email that was certain to prove a waste of time. “While we are all grieving M’s death—long live M—now is the time to be _team players_ and _follow instructions_ as if we were all perfectly reasonable _humans_ —”

“That’s enough, Q.” Mallory snapped, equal parts irritation and exhaustion lining his features. No one had foreseen exactly how much of a temper the humanized Quartermaster would have, nor how cutting he was willing to be in the face of his idea of stupidity. It was as if he were making up for his reduced power and mobility with being as annoying as possible, and M had the dubious pleasure of spending the most time with his recalcitrant Quartermaster next to R.

The circle had decided that Q was too dangerous to give even a little slack in his untested leash and that by virtue of being the heir and holder of the 00-seals he could summon the wayward agents at will, and that given these two facts (the both of which Q insisted were unequivocally false) there was no need for the new Quartermaster to leave his domain at all.

Never mind that was not how it worked now nor had it ever worked, Q had made known loudly and increasingly profanely. M and R had taken to making Moneypenny check them for curses after every interaction they were forced to have with the Quartermaster, especially ones involving his 00-agents.

Mallory was just grateful the non-MI6 members of the circle did not feel the need to be constantly hovering around their newest acquisition. He was positive that C would insist on total confinement if the man heard even a fraction of Q’s scathing opinions on just about everything. Mycroft, too, would not think twice about subduing any and all probable threats to England—something that Q, in all of his sharp-tongued glory, could definitely be.

The role of Quartermaster had better mellow Q out sooner rather than later, or this whole arrangement was going to go spectacularly wrong the first time M allowed Q any significant power in his own branch—which had to happen, as M and Moneypenny had more pressing matters to attend to and there was a reason R had not been promoted to Quartermaster before Q had shown up.

“You know this is not going to work and you know you are going to have to send me out to collect them personally.” Q sniped back after hitting the send button with a sharp gesture that screamed insubordination. “Sir.”

Gods save him from stroppy Quartermasters of wildly unclear motivations, Mallory silently prayed.

“We are not sending you out unless necessary,” M kept tight hold of his tone, finding that neutral worked best in the face of Q’s trigger-happy ire. When Q looked as if he might protest—at length and with excruciating detail—Mallory held up a hand to forestall him. “And now, there is a much stronger case for it being necessary when none of them respond to any of the messages sent. I don’t disagree with your assessment, Quartermaster, but you know it is not so simple.”

They all knew that Q was not so simple, but the crux of the matter was that none of them knew in what ways the magically-made Quartermaster was not simple. Death commands aside, they were all taking a huge risk. R had just this morning stridently insisted that while Q may not have been able to lie before, those like he had been were incapable of telling the truth without some malicious manipulation. M did not disagree with her assessment, though, as Moneypenny had hesitantly pointed out, Q did seem an awful lot more bark than bite thus far.

“Then make it simple—I will obviously be here when you are ready,” Q hissed over his shoulder, typing aggressively into a series of new programs that meant little to M.

Though it really was just an awful lot of barking.

Q took to his role as Quartermaster with all the ill grace he could manage without giving M real grounds to reprimand him, which was both exactly what Mallory expected and exhausting. The terms of his binding were very strict, and the Quartermaster had spent the last few days pushing every boundary he could find to the point of pain—literally. For all involved.

The binding that confined their Quartermaster to the MI6 headquarters had manifested as thick black band tattoos around his wrists and ankles; with seven of them, they wrapped all the way up his forearms and almost up to his knees. When Q pushed the physical boundaries of where he was allowed, they apparently caused enough pain to discourage him from pushing any further, though he was tight-lipped about exactly how.

Even with the assurance that all was turning out as the circle had intended, R had still very nearly tased Q after tracking him down to the sub basements, barely even able to still be called MI6 given the state of the London underground and their temporary lodgings, doing who even knew what. Moneypenny had been called down to TSS to separate the two of them after a terrified tech had called M from the break room.

Mallory was, frankly, over it already. He had hesitantly shared his concerns with Mycroft the night before, and between the two of them it had come up that Q was perhaps suffering under the strain of filling both the old M’s death curse and the new bindings laid into him. They had agreed to work on getting the rest of the circle to loosen the Quartermaster’s leash enough to allow him out into the world just long enough to retrieve the 00-agents, hopefully reducing the magical conflict enough for him to settle.

Q was not making working on it easy in the least.

Deliberately choosing to take that as a victory, M left TSS to go argue with the more obtuse members of the circle about loosening Q’s leash enough for him to fulfill the terms of his service.

 

A week and entirely too much back room dealing later, Q had permission to do whatever it took to get the wayward 00-agents (and himself) back to MI6 as quickly as possible . He seemed to be pushing the outer limits of how smug a human face could be. Mallory and Moneypenny and R hurried him out the door before the rest of the circle could see it.

 

The thing was, while Q could not summon the agents to him via the seals, he could feel them, to an extent—not as much as he hoped to later, when they were actually his, but enough. Enough to know that they would not come easy. The circle had been one thing but fooling the 00-agents was going to be another game entirely.

Of course, he had been good at games before being made Quartermaster and thanks to the generous wiggle room of what _being Quartermaster_ meant, now he was better.

 

“Care to make a more interesting bet just between the two of us?” Vivien murmured as the new hand was dealt by a professionally bored looking attendant. The two of them had been flirting relentlessly since three days ago, when Vivien had clocked the gun callouses on the palms of Q’s hand and the cut of his suit jacket, loose enough to hide a weapon and Q had caught her counting cameras.

Besides the gambling, they were playing a very good game.

Like any good spy, she kept her friends close and potential enemies closer, and Q had been just careless enough that he was dangerous but not as dangerous as Vivien herself—a combination of traits making for good potential bed partners. She was a constant hum of danger down his spine, a warmth in his belly next to all the vodka he’d been drinking. It was good. Betting was also good.

“A more interesting bet than someone else’s money?” Q teased in return, flipping a poker chip between his fingers easily. The rest of the table were unimpressed with their antics, but Q was only here to impress one person and she was watching his fingers with a simply delightful avarice.

“Easily,” Vivien purred, gesturing for another drink from the bartender. She’d stopped drinking hours ago, switching to virgin mojitos, not that Q was supposed to know that—but he could smell it, and besides, it was just good strategy. “Let’s say that if _you_ win, you can do anything you like with me… and if I win, I with you.”

Q laughed and peeked at his cards before laying them back on the table. “Sounds like either way I’ll win that bet, Vivien. A sure bet is no fun.”

Vivien pouted dramatically and took a huffy sip of her new drink, likewise glancing at her cards only for a moment. “But it will be so much more fun when I’ve won you,” she over stated confidently. They were showing off, the both of them, with the appearance of heavy drinking and counting cards.

“So what you’re saying is that if you win, you get me, and if I win—I get you?” Q restated with a raised eyebrow, voice dry as he could make it without losing the amusement. The chip in his hand vanished for a moment.

“Now you’re getting into the idea,” Vivien verified with a triumphant grin. “Come on, don’t be dull, go all in or go home.”

“Oh, very well,” Q relented with faux reluctance, letting his eyes linger on her mouth. “I’ll take your bet.” The chip had reappeared on the smooth felt of the poker table, and he slid it forward with the rest of his actual bid.

 

Q won the hand by the skin of his teeth and without cheating. He—and Vivien—had been cheating outrageously in every game they ended up tabled together on, each pushing the other to more reckless feats of card counting and sleight of hand and psychological manipulation, but for this game—for this bet—he had to win straight. Call it a matter of professional pride. Call it keeping the magic clean.

Vivien took her loss with humour and grace but begged off cashing in his victory until later in the night, claiming ‘something to take care of, won’t take me long at all’.

When she met him in his room three hours later, she had changed into something deep scarlet and clingy, taken her hair down to fall in sultry waves around her collar bones, and smelled of blood and chemicals beneath very expensive perfume. Q breathed her in with a soft, struck smile and pulled her through the door only to press her against it in a passionate kiss once it was closed.

“Are you mine now?” each word was interspersed with either a lingering kiss against the side of Vivien’s neck, and Q could now taste the blood she smelled of though it was unlikely anyone else would. She laughed, then gasped as he bit sharply at her collarbone, threading strong hands through his hair.

“You won, so here I am,” she agreed, arching against him. He could feel her strength, held back for a lover in a way she would not any one else.

“Good,” Q breathed, and _pulled_.

Vivien melted into him like mist and Q was left alone in the room panting softly. He gripped the back of his neck sharply and cursed. Tumbling out of the entryway and into the bathroom, Q haphazardly tugged off his suit jacket and shirt with shaking hands. The back of his neck was burning fiercely, almost unmanageably so. Q peered at his back with a sharp twist and slight beetling of his brows.

Starting just at his hairline and dropping down his spine was the faint imprint of thirteen moons in different phases, the full moon mid-back. The new moon curled around the knobby bones at the top of his spine was a brilliant silver sliver against heavy, bottomless black.

“Fuck.” Q swore at his reflection, wide-eyed. That was not subtle in the least.

 

Catching his second agent proved much simpler.

Q focused on the seals, filtering through what little he could feel from each, and picked out the one who held the most anger, taking a gamble. He found the agent in an arms dealer’s lair, and marched right up to him with as much of his remaining power on display as he could manage.

“I’m Q,” he stated baldly, both hands on the counter between them. “I’ll help you ruin every last one of those motherfuckers who had a hand in killing Olivia if you come with me.”

The wiry man across from him eyed him up and down and extended a hand. “I’m Trevor,” he said, “and I’ll take that offer.”

Q shook Trevor’s hand and _pulled_. The second moon burned in like ice at the base of his spine, leaving Q gritting his teeth and sweating a bit at the pain.

Two down. Eleven to go.

 

The basement of the nightclub was packed to the gills with screaming, sweaty bodies. Q had already elbowed at least three people in the nose and had precisely zero guilt over it. He fought his way over to the group in charge, briefly regretful that he couldn’t just zap the shit out of every idiot in his way.

Honestly, underground fighting rings were not this interesting, people.

“I want in,” Q shouted at the fight master over the roar of the crowd. The fight master gave him an unimpressed once over that tempted Q to elbow him in the nose too, but he wrestled his temper down to baring his teeth in what very obviously was not a smile.

“Gotta fight the Lightbringer,” he bawled back, gesturing vaguely across the ring. Q glanced in that direction, purposefully skittering over who he was here for.

“That’s a stupid name,” Q wondered sometimes at how loose his tongue had become in this human form, at how easy words were to him now. Frequently it was not speaking his mind that proved difficult, a novel experience for Q.

The fight master sneered. “Not as stupid as you’ll look when she breaks your pretty face. Still wanna go?”

Q leveled a flat look at the fighter and scoffed wordlessly as he scrawled his name—a fake—onto the clipboard that held a rough outline of the night’s matches, several slots on it still blank. This particular club liked the chaos of flesh blood and no waivers. That was fine. Q liked the particular chaos and lack of accountability such a fluid system was built on.

Unimpressed, the fight master snatched his pen back and shoved Q towards the ring, which was marked out only by tape on cement and crowding bodies. When he stumbled over the boundary, a mocking cheer went up from the bloodthirsty crowd. Across the ring stood ‘Lightbringer’, his opponent, who was a bored looking Valkyrie of a woman.

Gods, she was beautiful.

She was going to smash his face in, the fight master was totally right.

Q bared his teeth again and lifted his tape-wrapped hands in a loose defense. “You’re mine,” he hissed in bald challenge as they began to circle each other.

The valkyrie laughed, open and easy. “Only if you can beat me, little boy.”

And Q did not believe in luck like most humans did, but he could feel the moons marked down his spine and how she belonged and where she fit already—he just had to beat her, like she said. A sliver of warmth lit him from within.

He moved first, significantly smaller than her but quick as a snake, feinting right and high but throwing his fist low and left—and they were off.

She was brutal, all immovable planes of muscle and sledgehammer blows, and she took first blood minutes into the fight from Q’s lip with an open-palmed strike that would have ground his nose right up into his brain had he not jerked back in time.

Q sucked hard on the split and spat blood and laughed, euphoric. She would beat him if she hit him and he would deserve the pounding—but she had to hit him to do that, and with his blood between them it was not going to happen again.

Wonderful thing that she was, she laughed with him and was still laughing when he threw himself at her, using her weight as a counterpoint against his own to throw them both back. She stumbled, not expecting him to come in so close. Q wrapped his thighs around her neck and tightened his hold like a vice.

Writhing against the ground with surprising flexibility, she lashed out at his face and neck, face slowly reddening. Q took the awkwardly angled blows, spat blood again, and curled around her head.

“Yield, yield,” he panted, sides heaving with exertion, “I told you you’d be mine.”

She did not yield.

Q choked her into unconsciousness.

The crowd—gods, he’d forgotten their audience entirely, their roar blended seamlessly with the roar of blood and adrenaline in his head—cheered raucously, hauling him up and away from her body to receive his prize and adulation. Q shook and shivered with the stomach-hollowing drop of adrenaline leaving his system. A bag was shoved into his hands and he was shoved out of the ring in short order, the next fight already gearing up to start.

He had lost sight of his valkyrie, but that was okay. He could find her again after he’d had a drink. Several drinks.

 

The bag had turned out to contain money, which was convenient since Q had not been carrying any and the club bar upstairs overpriced their drinks (although the bartender had raised a brow at Q’s fantastically swollen and split open mouth and given him fifty percent off straight shots).

Knocking back his fourth shot of something that tasted a bit like gasoline and hit almost as hard as his opponent had, Q felt almost steady enough to venture back downstairs and look for her when she beat him to the punch and slid onto the empty barstool next to him.

“You’re fucking fast,” she said by way of introduction, hands on the bar. Her knuckles were bruised and split, though Q would wager some of the blood was his.

“And you hit like a fucking tank,” Q replied, pushing a shot in her direction. She accepted with a nod. There was the shadow of not-quite-developed bruising under her chin and around her neck. He felt inordinately proud of himself.

“You beat me,” something was odd in her voice, and Q hummed noncommittally, waiting.

She glared at him—apparently that was not the response she had been looking for. “What the fuck did you want me for, then?”

Q smiled to himself, small and private and triumphant. He didn’t believe in luck, but this was damn near enough for him.

“I want you to come home,” he told her and _pulled_ for the third time in as many days.

Her moon burned into his skin high between his shoulder blades, pain unmuted by the shots Q had done.

 

Q had been playing chess in the park for three afternoons now, slouched in a dirty hoodie and washed-out jeans that were slightly too thin for the weather. It was a long shot, but three times was the charm and he felt there was a bit more than luck on his side.

What was not luck was the fact that he had won every chess game so far, quickly earning himself a reputation for being scarily adept at chess and quite grumpy. It had proved to be a relaxing few days, which he had desperately needed after his fight with—and he was only now realizing he did not know her name, which certainly was not ‘Lightbringer’. Honestly. Her name had not been important; what was important was that she was _his_.

His current opponent was a neatly dressed woman who had not once attempted to speak with him or even make eye contact. She was devilishly good at chess and therefore a refreshing break from mediocre to terrible that everyone else seemed to be. Granted, public park chessboards were not the first place Q would look for worthy chess opponents—but here she was.

Even with her skill, an hour and a half later of concentrated silence, Q had maneuvered her into a corner.

“Checkmate. You’re mine,” Q used his piece to knock her king over and kept his voice bland and uninterested. Across from him, his partner blinked slowly.

“So I am,” she replied after a long look at the board, voice deep for her small frame. “Well played, sir.”

“Oh, yes, I like to think so,” Q said and flashed her a blinding grin while _pulling_.

Honestly, it was like the universe wanted Q to catch the wayward agents.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thirteen agents whyyy did I choose that number
> 
> At least Q is enjoying himself xD


	4. Following the threads

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Q is not in over his head with this whole affair

Four agents at home under his skin and Q could feel the strain of it like too many shots of espresso, a kind of nervous energy that made him want to run (to chase, to hunt). They were his by trick and by trial and by promise, but even kept thoughtless and asleep in his bones they were restless, dreaming. It would take all thirteen accepting his mastery to calm them, though Q suspected that containing all of them at once would never be comfortable.

As it was, Q spent the night alone with a mirror, working to keep his eyes a slightly muddy hazel and not brilliantly green and gold, tamping down the silver-bright glow of the filled moons on his spine. Such a blatant display of power was counter to his plans for the rest of the agents, which largely revolved around his ability to shift and blend seamlessly into others’ expectations.

Besides, leaking magic was gauche at best.

That morning, eyes pleasingly resembling pond water, Q hacked into MI6’ servers and flicked through the double-oh files. He deliberately avoided details about the agents he had yet to catch up with—there was nothing he could do about his own magic and the agents already folded into his body and the natural threat he posed that any one of the 00-agents would pick up on as soon as he entered a room, but there were a dozen possible explanations to hand-wave that away; what was harder was hiding that he knew them like he knew his own soul, and any additional recognition would make hiding that knowledge harder still.

Q was also avoiding the increasingly annoyed messages from R in the corner of the screen, something about how he had a password and he was Quartermaster for gods’ sake he didn’t need to blah blah what was interesting was the files of the four agents he had already caught: Vivien Waters, 0013; Cliff Innesfield, 001; Kate Luce—ah, that was where her ridiculous moniker had come from—0012; and Naomi Temple, 002.

The pattern was interesting. Q had a rough plan, of course, had to—but much of what he was doing and had already done relied heavily on fate’s fickle attention. And yet, here, in clean type and numbers, a pattern: last to first, last to first. Before, Q-who-was-not-Q would have taken this as right and proper. More human now, more subject to human laws of magic, it was something he would have named luck if not for its structure.

Q could almost taste Olivia’s life blood on his lips, a sacrifice and offering not asked for.

Taking a moment to scroll through their files and make note of any and all aliases also listed (not to gaze fondly at their pictures, though he did make a note to explore the side effects of Olivia’s wish more closely), Q pulled up a program he had written for just this occasion and input all of their names and aliases. Double oh agents were traditionally ghosts, but in this new era of magic and tech, it was increasingly difficult for even ghosts to fly under the radar.

This program, the very first program Q had written as Quartermaster, would make that much easier by trawling the internet for any mentions of his agents and erasing it.

It may or may not also have been loaded with a magical trap that would spring on anyone searching for his agents and Q planned on never admitting either way what he had done or how he had done it.

Finally, feeling an odd prickle of responsibility, Q sent a very terse update to M. Still ignoring R (and her attempts at kicking him out so that he’d have to use the proper front door rather than this improper back door), he backed out of MI6’s servers and closed the hole he’d used behind him.

Time to see if his strange not-luck was holding true.

 

Q swore long and fluently in several different languages as his next prey—target—agent ducked into an alley, at the opposite end of the street where Q was waiting. He had not even made contact yet and knew in his bones that the agent had not made him, but the infuriating man seemed to have a well-honed sixth sense that kept him far away from Q’s machinations.

It had been a week of endless cat and mouse and Q wasn’t even sure that the mouse knew that it was playing. This agent had holed up in a tourist trap excuse of a town in France that at first Q liked due to how easy it was to blend in but now hated viciously. Not to mention, M was apparently emboldened by Q’s moment of weakness demonstrated by checking in and now got in touch one way or another every single day asking for additional updates.

Updates that Q did not have because this particular agent was slippery as an eel and had a radar for oncoming shenanigans unlike anything Q had encountered. Arse. He hated him.

The town was too bright, too loud, too smelly, and way too crowded _all the time_. What his agent saw in it Q would never know. But now, after losing him for the fucking eighteenth time, it was time for a new strategy.

Fortunately, Q had already been to see an arms dealer—thank you, Cliff—and modifying a sniper rifle to deliver tranquilizing rounds rather than regular bullets was only mildly complicated after he applied the full force of his frustration to the problem.

Q had a beautiful trick planned, and now that plan was ruined, and he was very put out by it. Clicking the rifle together in a deep sulk, he hunkered down across the street from the apartment complex where his agent was staying at waited. To pass the time, he listed all the reasons he was annoyed at this particular mission alphabetically in his head, and then, realizing what he was doing, listed all the reasons he was annoyed with the bindings the circle had laid into him at length.

Mission, indeed.

Hours later—and not a moment too soon—his agent returned, looking around cautiously before entering the apartment building.

Q shot him as he vanished into the foyer. No self-respecting agent would have a street-facing window in their place of residence and this one was no exception. Fortunately, it was four in the fucking morning (Q was freezing, a new experience that he also hated), so there was no one to witness his agent fall, tranq in the meat of his shoulder.

Packing up quickly as he could, Q threw the rifle bag over his shoulder and sprinted down the stairs to the street. The tranq would keep a normal man out for an hour, but his agents were just as tricky as he could be and there was no saying how long the same tranq would act on Q so—speed was of essence. His agent was still unconscious when Q reached his side, though in the time it took for Q to check him for any injuries from the unexpected fall he had begun to stir.

Hissing out between his teeth and making a note to be impressed by the agent’s recovery time later, Q put both hands on either side of his agent’s face and _pulled_ while chanting “Mine, mine, mine, come on,” under his breath.

It wasn’t a trick. It wasn’t a game fairly won. It was cheating, plain and simple, and not how he had intended to go about this.

The agent fought hard, his energy writhing and biting at Q’s hands, pushing back against the claim by instinct alone, his mind still hobbled by tranquilizer and surprise.

Q fought harder, forcing his agent to submit by strength of will alone. There was a dizzying moment where Q found himself staring into his own eyes lit up brilliantly with magic before collapsing back into himself abruptly, elbows hitting the empty ground.

Even already pulled in by the seal, his agent was fighting back—it felt for a moment as if someone had taken a knife to Q’s back and was skinning off his tattoo. Q moaned, stuffed his fist against his mouth to make sure it didn’t happen again, and seized up for an agonizingly long moment.

“Mine, mine, I’m sorry, you’re mine, just—I’m sorry, give up, give up, I’m not giving you up—” Q shook and shivered, feverish and freezing in turns. He rolled too quickly to press his back against the foyer wall and grunted at the flare of pain it sent up and down his spine, still babbling apologies and ownership under his breath.

Gods, it hurt, it hurt, this was why he hadn’t forced the agents to him in the first place, damn letting his temper get the better of him, he was _better than this_.

Later, Q would be utterly unable to tell how long it had taken from him to subdue the agent under his skin properly, only that it had been almost too long, only that he had begun to think that he had failed, failed Olivia, no way was he going to get a second chance after this—but finally he won. Panting and wrung out, he lay on the hard tile long enough for one of the apartment’s residents to emerge for some early shift somewhere, stepping over his legs with a deeply judgmental look.

Q summoned the energy to flip off their retreating back and staggered to his feet. Right. Hotel room, bed, sleep until the phantom ache of magic misused went away, preferably in that order.

 

Only mostly recovered from forcing his agent into submission, Q planned his next trick a bit more carefully. The seals were more active with five agents tucked beneath them and he spent yet another all-nighter with his magic wide open to what he could pick up through them, eyes glowing like candles in the dark. There was a thread of violence and bloodlust underscoring every connection, a grief barely contained; Q could relate, but relating to his agents was not what he was here to do. One of the threads shivered with anticipatory adrenaline and just a touch of fear, almost too faint for Q to pick up.

It was enough.

Working on a hunch, he refit the sniper rifle for more deadly bullets and packed it away with his meagre belongings (laptop, change of clothes, small collection of flash drives both filled and waiting to be filled with stolen data, small collection of tinker’s tools and medical supplies), abandoning the relative comfort of his hotel room and civilization for a long hike out into the wilderness.

The woods where Q was sure he would find his next agent were old and dark and deep and welcomed him with confused enthusiasm. They smelled of damp and heavy rot, the season having turned for the worse this far north. Q did not have time to play in the trees like they urged him to do, but he did press his nose into wet and sticky bark to breathe the forest deep into his lungs more than once. It was an unexpected gift, tracking his agent to a place like this, drowned in rain and magic both.

Disappointed in his all-too-serious focus but willing to assist him nonetheless, the trees helped Q track and travel more quickly through their demesne. Q was careful to leave little smears of his blood on the eldest of the trunks he encountered along the way, intimately aware of their power. A deeper connection to spirits like these would be helpful, later.

Finally Q found himself spat out of the woods to the shores of a dark lake with a foreboding house perched on its opposite bank. Blinking rapidly in the onslaught of sunshine after so much murky, diffuse light, he turned to bow formally to the woods and expressed his thanks and admiration in a language long since fallen into disuse. The trees closest whispered and creaked with their collective pleasure and urged him across the lake with something like grandfatherly sternness.

Not near foolish enough to disregard the wood’s warning, Q made quick work of running around the edges of the lake. Closer to the house, he could hear the tell-tale crashes and shouts of people fighting hand-to-hand. The front door, barely visible from where he stood, suddenly splintered open and five men spilled out, four clearly against one.

Q threw himself into the woods again before they could notice him and scrambled through his pack to assemble the sniper rifle as quietly as he could manage, though with all the noise fists striking flesh made he probably didn’t have to be so careful. Rifle assembled, he turned back to the scene and pressed himself into the dirt.

The four thugs had almost subdued their single opponent, who was pinned to the ground between two of them but thrashing and biting like a pissed off mongoose. Q smiled thinly, breathed the scent of old rot deep, and sniped one of the men holding his fucking agent down through the top of his head.

Chaos reigned.

The remaining three men cussed and ducked and generally made fools of themselves as they alternated between staring in shock at their fallen companion and into the forest which up until that moment had been an impassive observer of their violence. Q’s agent, bless him, took to the distraction as if he’d known it was coming, knifing the second mercenary still holding him in the gut with ruthless efficiency.

Not to be outdone, Q shot the third man between his eyes and in a stroke of petty ire over the thought of someone laying hands on what was his, the fourth in the thigh, shoulder, and heart in quick succession. The forest around him was silent as a grave and just as cold, but Q could swear he felt a thrum of approval over the spilled blood under his hands.

“Hungry, are you?” he asked the woods, digging his fingers into damp loam. A chorus of raven’s calls answered him, the carrion birds drawn by the scent of blood and death. Q huffed a laugh, savoring his triumph and the spark-pop of alien (now) power around him.

“I offer you these deaths by my hand and my right, the blood of mine enemies become yours,” Q gave the words and the intent behind them the deadly focus they deserved, holding the moment until sound returned to the woods, brighter than before.

The important matters attended to, Q hitched his bag over his shoulder and tucked his rifle under his arm to emerge from the woods once again, this time in clear view of the last man standing. Or rather, sitting and cursing at his ankle virulently. Ah. Trouble, then.

“Good thing I was in the area,” Q called casually, stretching his mouth into a bloodthirsty grin when his agent whipped a gun out on him.

“In the area? Fuck you,” his agent called back, humour tinging his voice like the grave. He did not lower his gun.

“Careful with that, I just saved your life,” Q said and deliberately turned his attention from his agent to breaking down his rifle and packing it away with practiced movements. “I’m Q. It’s rude to shoot people who have just saved your life,” he added as if on an afterthought, shooting a piercing look at his agent.

“What kind of name is Q?” his agent asked. “I’m Benji,” he added. It was so nice to have names to go with faces, Q thought with a touch of self-recrimination over how his last encounter with an agent had gone.

Rifle packed away, Q pulled out a thick roll of medical wrap and tossed it playfully at Benji’s head. Startled, the agent lowered his gun to catch the wrap, which was pretty much what Q had been going for.

Benji looked at the wrap for a long moment, then back to Q. “All right, I’ll bite. Since I owe you my life, as you so clearly pointed out, what do you want?”

Q shrugged, spread his hands out before him as if in supplication. “Your life,” he told Benji plainly, and _pulled_. After the agony of capturing his last agent, the burn of Benji’s moon was almost soothing.

 

When all of this was over, Q was sitting his agents down for some serious training in guarding their words more carefully.

 

The medical chart in Q’s hands told him that the man in bed before him was a John Doe, having been brought in unconscious and not woken up since. Q felt a pang of regret—the date of admittance was during the week he had been in France chasing his tail, and if he’d come here instead of going there, the accident— ‘accident’—might not have happened.

Q slipped the medical chart back into its holder and closed the door as he fully entered the room. It was dark; Q had wanted as few witnesses as possible and that aside, it was easier to charm his way past one or two sleep-deprived nurses and doctors than it was the entire day staff. If things went his way, he would leave without anyone clearly remembering his presence.

Breathing with careful, rhythmic deliberation, Q pulled the one chair in the room up next to his John Doe’s bed and sat forward in it, curling his hand around not-John’s. He refused to think about the unnatural stillness, focusing instead on the gun callouses and scars he could feel on his agent’s palm. Humming under his breath, still strictly controlling his breathing, Q carefully leaned forward to lean his forehead against their entwined hands and closed his eyes.

All hospitals were a foot in death, liminal spaces filled with hopes and dreams and broken hearts. Around him the steady rhythm of the hospital bent and distorted to the tune of Q’s humming, slowly losing its technological edge and sliding into something more organic, dream-like.

Q stood up into murky darkness thick enough to swallow his fingertips if he stretched too far out. Counting his breaths, he closed his eyes and reached out with other, trickier senses.

Ahh, there he was. No John Doe at all.

“Martin,” Q sang softly, twisting the encompassing darkness to his own ends. It spun out like thick thread from his fingertips, pulled up in the dark. “Maaarrtiin, I know who you are.” He could feel Martin’s heartbeat under his body’s fingers pulsing in time with the thread twined around his dream-self’s fingers, both slowly coming into time with his own metronome heartbeat and breath.

“I can get you out of here, I can take you home,” Q crooned into the murk, following the thread being spun out of it. The air was thick as only dreamed air could be, each step more like swimming into the ocean than walking at all. The thread—more of a cord now, shadows clinging to it faster and faster the deeper he went—twitched against his palm, and Q twitched it back, unhurried and steadily timed to each breath he took.

Dreams were odd places, thin and illogical. At the end of the thread there was nothing. Q stood still as a statue in the gloom, breathing even through his nose, and closed his eyes.

Martin stood across from him in a plain room, more of a box than anything else, looking faintly puzzled at Q’s appearance. Q lifted his hand, still holding the thread, and twitched it one last time. His agent frowned and looked down at his chest where the thread had buried itself, and then back up at Q.

“Will you come back with me?” Q asked, sing-song and eerie, too alive and too full of energy for this half-gone place. He could feel his essence shining through, not enough humanity here to hold it back, and suspected that his eyes would be star-filled and bottomless.

“Why?” Martin asked and he sounded dead already, dead and gone and spectral with it. Alarm shot through Q, but he clamped down on it and refused to lose track of his beat.

“Even here, even dying, I can hold you,” Q tasted Olivia’s blood, Olivia who he could not hold in death because it had not been his place, but Martin— “I can heal you, wake you from this dreaming.” His lips and chin felt wet, too warm, and in the dream Q knew it to be Olivia’s blood he was tasting again in truth, while the fraction of his consciousness monitoring his body noted his nose had begun to bleed.

Humans were very ill suited for this kind of magic, even if Q had a strong right to it.

Uncanny with death, Martin tilted his head and watched Q for a long, long moment. Q felt transparent before him, magic and bindings and Olivia’s blood on his mouth all laid out in a way they had not been before and would not be again. He breathed, breathed and held on to the hope that so long as Martin’s breath and heartbeat matched his own that he would walk away with his agent safe and intact.

“I will come,” Martin finally agreed, and he sounded like a bell ringing in final arrangement to Q’s own melody.

“Thank you,” Q breathed, and _pulled_ , pulled them both back, back and up and away from death’s borders fast as he dared.

Q came to in Martin’s hospital bed, the agent tucked safe beneath his skin along with an IV. He stilled, heart beating wildly with sudden apprehension. His glasses. Where were his glasses, he couldn’t see—

A nurse slipped his glasses into his grasping hand and tsked severely at him when he could see her properly.

“That was very stupid, young man,” she informed him, holding up a stern finger when Q opened his mouth to retaliate. “That kind of magic is _very dangerous_ and you are lucky it was I who found the two of you and knew to not separate you.”

Q blinked and opened his mouth only to be interrupted by the really astonishingly intimidating nurse.

“It has been four days. Get out of my hospital before the doctor finds his first John Doe gone and another in his place and I make you _explain that you went into death alone_ and you have to _explain where his patient went_.” She made quick work of removing Q’s IV and pulse monitor and stripping back the starched bedding.

“I didn’t—” Q tried to explain, still stiff and slow with what had apparently been four days of dreaming.

“Nope. Get out. Go. Don’t tell me and don’t come back, please,” the Scary Nurse ordered firmly, the please doing absolutely nothing to soften her steely gaze. Q nodded, feeling unaccountably guilty, and stumbled out of the bed to follow her orders before she made good on her threats.

Martin’s seal pulsed on Q’s back in a fading echo of the beat Q had used to pull his agent back to the living, a testament to the weight and cost of the promise Q had made above all others.

Seven down, six to go.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Gotta catch 'em all, Q!
> 
> look i know eleven OCs is a lot of OCs, but _symmetry_ and _magic_ and so we're only four chapters deep but i did tag it slow burn
> 
> James (and Alec) are gonna get here eventually I promise xD ~~also the plot~~


	5. Down to the wire

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which there are unforeseen consequences to very complex magical workings

Q had been having—not nightmares, precisely, but uncomfortably vivid dreams that he rather suspected were not his to be having. Violence featured heavily, though not the kind Q was accustomed to; his violence was much less human than the brutal struggles his sleeping mind presented. It was a peek into the minds simmering beneath his skin and Q didn’t like that it felt wrong, somehow—a step too far even after all of his underhandedness when it came to dealing with his agents.

The trickery was a necessary evil that Q spared no guilt over, knowing what he did of his agents. Their scattered plans and contingencies were impressive and would spare Q a great deal of work later when he could not move so freely, but ultimately would not keep them safe in a world that sought to leave them behind by force if necessary. In Q’s hands, under his watchful eyes at the heart of MI6, they would be more free than they were now scattered to the winds and hiding. It was a bitter irony that he was struggling to make peace with.

Dreaming someone else’s mind was invasive for all involved.

He found it easier to stay awake, following up on leads, uncomfortable with the thought that it was his agents’ dreams he was having rather than his own. Along with tracking down his next target, Q set his identity-seeking program on to the three agents he had ensnared since last using it and erased any record of both his and Martin’s presence at the hospital he had been kicked out of.

M had left him a series of frazzled messages (Q assumed that was what lay under the increasingly formal language Mallory used) pressing the necessity of speed in Q’s mission, falling just shy of commanding him to acquire the remaining agents within the week. Without outright saying as much, Mallory heavily implied that certain factions within the British government were making noise about the perhaps now outdated and unnecessary nature of the 00-program, and in the chaos left by the old M’s death—not to mention the rather public humiliation of having MI6 headquarters blown up—they were not well positioned to press the issue. Especially, the subtext pointed out with a bluntness that may as well have been in the text itself, with all thirteen of the agents and now Q himself appearing to be in the wind.

Q was suspicious of this. Mallory himself seemed more and more inclined to be sympathetic to Q and his claims, despite being so integral to Q’s binding, but at this juncture that did not seem to matter much. He was reasonably certain that the true nature of Q and his so-called employment at MI6 was a secret restricted to only those who had been present at the dealing, but the anti double-oh sentiment had to be more widespread than that if M was having to play politics to keep the program afloat. Given that the program was not nearly so mundane as the paperwork would have it appear and dissolving it not nearly so simple as retiring the agents involved, the pressure was suspect at best.

The easy villain was C; while his entrance into the conversation had thoroughly derailed C’s damning of the too-dangerous monsters that made up the double oh program, it was easy to extrapolate where the man had been headed with his rant. But that did not scan through. C wasn’t positioned well enough to be both in the know about the double ohs and able to do something about it. In fact, Q was quite certain that had C not been a part of the circle, he would not even know that the agents were anything other than just that—agents.

No, there had to be someone else—likely multiple someones—targeting MI6’s best.

Olivia’s death, never adequately explained away by Silva’s betrayed madness, burned in Q’s mind like a funeral pyre he had every intention of feeding her enemies to.

Keeping a tight leash on his suspicions and his fury, Q politely emailed M back an estimated timeline and progress update along with several files containing information of interest to MI6 and the British government, collected courtesy of her best agents.

Hopefully that would hold the dogs off until Q was forced back behind MI6’s walls and able to do some real work.

 

Keenly aware that he was needed back at MI6, Q approached his next agent much more directly. Taking to the shadowy underbelly of the internet, he posted a cryptic message offering intel on the recent upheaval in the international spy community in exchange for mercenary services to aide in a personal matter. Within the day, the right mercenary took the bait and Q arranged to meet them in a Berlin club known for its extra-legal connections.

That the agent no doubt intended to use Q for all he knew and then leave was neither here nor there; after all, Q intended to use all he knew to ensure that the agent would not be leaving.

The bar was very reminiscent of the bar Q had caught Kate in. Keeping his smile strictly private, Q ordered two shots of the same vodka they had drunk that night and settled in to wait for his next agent. He did not have to wait long; his seat at the bar afforded him clear view of the club’s exits and when his agent slunk in through the back Q felt it like a cold finger pressed into his spine. The seals were getting more and more active, allowing him closer and more detailed glimpses into his agent’s lives. Q deliberately did not look at the man who was undoubtedly his, not wanting to prematurely betray himself with recognition.

Q tossed back both shots of vodka before him to give himself an excuse for the burn in his belly.

“Buy you another?” his agent purred in perfect German from just in Q’s blind spot and had Q not already been aware of exactly where the man was at all times thanks to the seal he may well have fallen off the barstool in his surprise.

Even then, it took him a moment to recover. “Only if you join me,” Q quipped when he felt that his voice would not betray how startled he had been, putting a touch of discomfort with the language on the end of his words.

The agent gestured briefly to the bartender and slid onto the barstool between Q and the closest exit. Glass in hand, Q made polite eye contact with his agent and tapped it on the bar before shooting it in a single gulp, his agent doing the same only seconds behind.

“I am Q,” he introduced himself as the burn settled in his throat. “I think we have business to discuss, yes?”

“Henry,” his agent replied shortly, distrust flashing in his eyes at Q’s name. “What business would that be, exactly?”

Henry’s suspicion was a slippery thing that Q was going to have to manage very carefully—deliberately using Q as his name was a risk, but one he hoped would pay off by suggesting that Q was somehow connected with M, the old one, rather than an entirely unknown third party of unverifiable motive (more irony not lost to Q).

That in mind, Q circled his finger around the top of his empty shot glass and let a bit of his own grief-fueled anger show as he spoke. “The business of tracking down the murderers of a dear friend of mine,” he said in stilted German. It was not that Q was unfamiliar with the language, but that the entirety of the trick he was attempting to pull over Henry was unfortunately ham-fisted compared to his previous wordplay and would only work if Henry thought it a result of poor German.

“I do not generally hunt murderers of _dear friends_ ,” Henry said pointedly, his suspicion unallayed. “It would be overkill.”

“It would be,” Q agreed, looking up through his glasses, “if she were only a friend and of no worldly importance.” He could not help the heat in his voice, honest where the rest of him often lent itself to deception. “She is not. Was not.”

Unimpressed—but still sitting with Q, that was the important part—Henry waved Q’s all too personal anger aside. “Do you have what you claimed to have?” he asked, arch tone suggesting he fully expected to be given the run-around.

Q was giving him the run-around, but not about this particular issue. He produced a slender file from his bag and slid it across the bar wordlessly. Henry flipped through it, brows raised incredulously by the end of it. “How the hell did you get this information?” he demanded.

It was true that information around M’s murder was on very tight lockdown, but Q himself was responsible for a good part of that obfuscation. Retrieving his own data was no challenge.

“I will tell you,” Q pretended stiffness, “after I buy you for so long as it takes to finish my business.”

Henry shook his head, distracted by the crime scene photos beneath his fingers. “Pay my fee, I’m yours,” he told Q, mind obviously elsewhere. Q was not the only one keeping tight rein of his anger, though Henry’s promised much quicker violence if provoked.

“Consider it done,” Q pulled a thick envelope out of his bag and set it on the bar near the open file. He resisted the urge to brush his fingertips against Henry’s hand, then gave in to it while _pulling_. By now, he almost looked forward to the lingering pain of another agent being swallowed by their seal, stretching up and back indulgently as Henry settled into his bones where he belonged.

Both the file on Olivia’s death and the envelope of money went back into Q’s bag to be returned to Henry later, and Q left the club without a backward glance.

 

The cemetery where Olivia was buried was modest affair, set behind and old church and reserved for non-military public servants. Most people had families to bury them in other, more personal resting places; this cemetery, with few graves bearing repeating names, was an orphan’s lot.

Q hated it.

Coming back to London before all of the agents were his was a risk, but the pull had been near impossible to ignore and while it seemed his new form did not need sleep as much as a human body would traditionally require, Q was getting to the point where he needed to be able to sleep through a night undisturbed by dreams and nightmares.

Olivia’s grave was towards the entrance to the cemetery, headstone unpleasantly clean and fresh next to all of its more weathered companions. A slight woman wrapped tightly in a black coat stood in front of it, still as a statue.

Q hesitated at the gate, white-knuckled grip on the latch, and took a deep breath.

His feelings for Olivia before had been—different. Not like this, not so strong, not so all-encompassing. The seals connecting him to his agents didn’t help, of course, their grief a static buzz at the back of his mind at all moments, but it wasn’t just their emotions he was experiencing—Q mourned Olivia in a hundred new ways every day. Had he known how deep the changes wrought by the bindings would go, Q may well have considered a different route to filling Olivia’s last wish.

It _hurt_ just being here, seeing her grave for the first time.

Olivia’s life blood in his mouth, smeared across his face, had not felt a fraction as heavy as this moment.

The woman did not move when Q finally shoved his feelings to the side and entered the cemetery in truth, though there was a shift in the air that said she was very aware of his presence.

Good. Q was very aware of hers, though for once there was a pull stronger than that of one of his agents.

“She was the last,” Q found himself saying without intending to, standing a few feet back from Olivia’s grave, voice soft and aching in the stillness. He hated it. He hated himself.

“She was—she had—” an existence with priorities and timing that Q was increasingly unable to reconcile with the man he had been made into tied his tongue in knots, ideas once as natural as breathing become distant and unknowable. Why had Olivia died? Why had he not tried harder to save her? Why was he left with nothing but desperately searching for a way to truly fill her last wish, having sacrificed almost everything just to be here?

“She was everything,” the woman murmured, her words lightly accented and strange. She turned from the headstone to face Q fully. Her eyes were wide and dark and bloodshot and she was crying without any indication that she realized.

Q dropped his gaze from her face to Olivia’s grave, unaccountably guilty. The inscription was almost entirely nondescript besides her name in bold letters, though he noted with no small amount of gallows’ humour that her name was held up by her family’s knot—a complex symbol representing the bond between their bloodline and their patron god. It must have been the only personal detail Oliva had felt she could request in her death, so much else in her life classified.

“She was everything,” he echoed and realized that he meant it, and meant something else besides: “You are everything.”

So sure that the double-oh agents would not come quietly, Q had planned every word and every play as if set against an enemy. Even when his actions cut so close to the truth that he may as well have been true, it was a game. Promising revenge and saving a life and walking into death and buying a man may have felt like playing straight before, but this—this was raw and terrible and Q felt himself the one to be transparent standing before his agent.

“I am Inez,” she told him, hugging herself in the chilly evening air. “You have the seals.” Inez was not asking, nor did she sound confrontational.

“Olive—Olivia told me to protect you,” Q confessed and only just did not clap his hands over his mouth with horror at spilling so easily what he had kept so well hidden thus far.

Inez nodded once, solemn and understanding perhaps better than Q himself. “I will not tell,” she said and she was still crying and Q thought he might as well if only the prickly ball in his chest would loosen enough to let him. He tried to thank her and could only choke around the words, eyes drawn inexorably to Olivia’s name no matter how he tried to look away.

Occupied with wrestling his grief back under control, Q did not notice Inez move until she was already touching him, reaching out to take his hands in hers.

She had the coarse callouses of a spy just like the rest of his agents, her palms rough and dry against his.

“I am yours to protect,” Inez murmured.

Q stumbled back, falling to the ground as Inez _pushed_ and this time the seal lit up in a warm glow that soothed better than the sun on a cold day. He sobbed once, hard and wet, fist pressed against his mouth and eyes clenched shut.

The cemetery remained terrible and impassive, stone eyes the only witness as Q fell apart.

 

Q left London with a storm inside of him. His eyes were too green, too gold—it was all he could do to keep them from lighting up and he had given up on maintaining the dull hazel that would have allowed him seamless humanity.

Humanity was exactly the problem, something small and messy Q had been forced into, bound to a form that would not obey, would not keep in line with his needs. Q—not even his name had been left to him!—fought the weakness his unwanted _humanity_ gifted him with so generously, traveling the old fashioned way with a reckless abandon that pushed the very limits of what the bindings on his soul allowed.

His bones ached. His bones _sang_ , so full of magic and spirit as they were. What did humanity mean to one such as Q when he contained such a multiplicity? His agents sealed into his body by the light of the moon were open defiance and denial of the constraints of humanity he was forced to wear, more than any person could conceive of let alone hold.

Humanity had cut Q open like a knife and he could not hold the tide of his grief over everything that had been stolen from him so instead he was _angry_.

M had sent him another message no doubt asking why Q had been in London but not returned to MI6’s clutching embrace.

Q ignored it.

This time he had looked up the files on the agent he was after, tenth of the thirteen, unwilling to play fool to fate’s hand. 005 was one Liam O’Rourke, a brightly smiling red-headed man who looked more a boy. Q saw through the playful dimples in his picture for the mask they were: 005 was by definition as vicious and deadly as his fellow double-ohs and no doubt used his boyish charm to enhance that deadliness.

Liam was in Venice, staying in a youth hostel that catered largely to wayward Americans looking to experience history. Q did not care how he appeared when he swept into the sorry establishment, eyes flashing and face pale.

Everything could be bought, and Q bought the key and number of 005’s room from the over worked hostel keeper with an astonishingly large bribe. If he could not get by unnoticed the proper way, he would buy blindness. There was no time for subtlety and besides that Q was in no state to blend in with the dirty wash of humanity, even in a place so steeped in ancient magics as Venice.

It was an hour before Liam returned to his room, and Q was waiting cross-legged on his bed, eyes radiant in the gloom.

“You swore a vow to serve,” Q hissed before 005 had a chance to react to his presence at all, unfolding from the bed to stand aggressively in Liam’s personal space. “Return and fill that vow.”

Q was not the only one to make foolish promises. 005 visibly swallowed and reholstered his gun, Q holding every bit of his attention even standing a few inches shorter and significantly less muscled. The bindings on Q’s wrists felt as though they were winding tight as a watch spring around his arms, grinding his bones together and he was outside the bounds of how he should be, more vengeful spirit than Quartermaster but he didn’t care. The pain helped even as it served as yet another humiliating reminder of his humanity.

“You have a right to that vow?” Liam asked defiantly, arms folded over his chest in defense.

“More than you know.” Q should probably get a handle on his temper and his magic, much of which was borrowed from the agents sleeping in his skin, but he was in no mood for it. Knowing that he was making a mistake served only to heighten his emotions, the inevitable crash sending adrenaline slithering through his blood.

Something in Q’s face—likely his eyes—swayed Liam towards surrender. He sighed heavily and dropped his arms back to his sides, standing in a loose approximation of parade rest. “I suppose I am yours to command, then,” 005 said, submission and trepidation warring for equal footing in his voice.

Q _pulled_ and welcomed the bone-splitting ache as his due.

The anger and the agony were better than the weight of grief any day.

 

Q had nightmares in truth that night, awakening sweat-damp and nauseous in the uncomfortable hostel bed before dawn. His face in the mirror was gaunt, body taking the toll as Q continued to push the limits of his bindings and power. Still feeling tangled up and oddly helpless, Q rubbed wearily at his too-bright eyes and slumped against the wall.

“I’m sorry I’m not doing a very good job at this,” he muttered to the empty room, defeat lining his every movement. “It’s different, being like this. I know I promised, but…” Q tipped his head back against the wall with a dull thump, welcoming the little spark of discomfort.

“It’s hard.” There was no way he could have known how hard it would be—not catching his agents, not answering to the circle and MI6, not balancing protection with duty, or any one of the variables he had already accounted for, but the one he had not.

“How do I be human, Olive-branch?” Q asked, an ache in his throat that resonated down into his chest. “How do you all manage all this—this feeling?”

The room was empty and silent and Q was so, so full.

“I’m sorry,” Q repeated softly. He let his eyes slip closed, breathing in and out with deliberate control, and when he opened them again they were muddled hazel and did not light the room at all.

 

The festival of the dead was bright and raucous, equal parts celebration and remembrance. Q would have been striking in a slim-fitting suit painted with opalescent bones and a death mask save for that he matched with almost every other suited person there. He slipped through the crowd with ease, ducking under flailing arms and moving in time with the ever-present music to side-step around dancing couples.

His agent was just ahead, brilliant in a red Lady Death’s dress and matching corpse body paint. She was laughing at some street artist’s antics, throat long and gleaming in the sun and Q felt his breath catch at the sight. He stole a rose from a grinning skeleton, flashing a mischievous grin of his own in exchange.

“Lady!” Q called out, crossing the distance between him and his agent with long strides. “Beautiful Lady Death, will you be mine?” He bowed elegantly and extended to pilfered rose, looking up to catch her eye with a crooked smile.

“And what will you give me in exchange, oh good man Death, if I am?” his agent called in return over the cacophony of joy around them, playing her part with relish. All through the festival similar scenes of ritual and seduction were taking place, celebrations of the pleasures of life and the inevitability of death all in one.

“For you, Lady, anything you desire,” Q let her take the offered rose and caught her free hand, pulling her flush against his body and swaying with the beat of the music. “You need but ask, and I will give you everything.” The fervent exchange was loosely scripted by tradition, though it was often tailored and broken by each person’s desires, and Q was laughing with the contagious joy of it all but meant every word.

His Lady Death and agent twined her arms around his neck and pulled them closer together still, close enough Q could smell gunpowder and oil on her skin. She pulled them into the dance and they were breathless and distracted by each other until the music segued from one song into another with barely a break. Q found himself pulled through the crowd and into a nearby alley, only slightly quieter than the main path of the parade, and pressed against the alley wall as his Lady Death kissed him passionately. He returned the kiss with equal fervor, fingers tangling in her hair.

She pulled back from the kiss and grinned at him. “And if I ask for naught but you in return?” his agent asked teasingly, panting only slightly less than Q from all the exertion.

“I would say that you already have me,” Q told her seriously, stealing one last quick kiss from her lips before _pulling_.

The brick wall of the alley proved a much-needed stabilizing force under Q’s hands as she melted into him, her presence an overwhelming pressure and dizzying fizz popping through his blood. He smiled nonsensically and tipped his head back against the wall, basking in the glow of her seal’s moon moving into perfect phase with the rest.

Her seal was one of the three full moons imprinted down Q’s spine, at the very centre of the manifest seal structure. Q had the quicksilver feeling that he would find the last two agents—the other two full moon seals—together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alternate chapter title: Q Experiences the Stages of Grief and Does Not Like It
> 
> Next chapter: James and Alec enter stage right pursued by bear! Also probs NSFW so we'll see how that goes (I've run out of prewritten chapters xD)
> 
> Hopefully this is coming through well in the story itself and does not require explanation, but I'm too close to be able to tell, so a bit of clarification: yes, Q is ALL over the place and his characterization is a mess. Two things are happening: one, the closer he gets to having all of his agents, the more the name/role of Quartermaster settles in, literally and figuratively changing who he is to better fill it. Two, he is dealing with being human for the first time in his existence and it is HARD. This messiness is gonna settle out (fingers crossed) as we go ^^


	6. Break and enter

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This was not how Q had intended to catch his agents. (NSFW)

A week later, Q slammed through the doors to a club, breathless and flush with victory. Angling so that he would be able to keep his peripheral vision on the entrance, he took a deliberate circuitous route to the bar to order himself several shots. Alcohol was figuring heavily into his games of cat and mouse with his agents; it served the primary purpose of giving him the appearance of being in a position of lesser control and therefore lesser power, and the secondary purpose of Q had found that he rather liked it.

Another thing he rather liked was toeing the line of almost too dangerous until it blurred right into flat out dangerous. The club was dark and filled with people looking to lose themselves in their bodies, writhing and grinding with abandon to the growly bass that beat like a second pulse in Q’s chest. He rushed through the first two shots he had ordered, celebration of what he had already stolen this evening, and savoured the third in anticipation of what he had yet to steal.

The bar seemed a safe spot to linger for the moment, so Q did just that, forgoing a bar stool to lounge with his elbows on the lip of the bar instead and letting his eyes sweep carelessly across the crowd. Against his back, the last two empty seals thrummed with what Q imagined to be confident expectation. Fittingly, the true moon was full tonight as well. The strange luck that had graced Q’s footsteps since the beginning seemed to be back for one last show.

Catching his last two agents had Q feeling giddy, high on his own power and an impossible task almost done. They were here somewhere; the seals on his back could not be wrong, and while it was likely mere fancy Q rather thought he could feel their eyes on him, predators sniffing out another of their kind. Grinning to himself at the thought, Q pushed off from the bar to throw himself onto the dance floor in a vain attempt to burn some of the energy twisting inside of him off.

And not a moment too soon; a laughing twirl with two very drunk boys afforded Q a glimpse of the club’s main entrance where four highly pissed off looking thugs had just come in and appeared to be roughly interrogating the coat girl. Waving off his dance companions, Q melted further into the crowd, hoping to reach the far side of the dance floor before he was spotted. The low and erratic lighting would aid him on that front, scattering the progress he made into a series of frenetic snapshots difficult for the human eye to follow.

The issue was, of course, more inhuman senses. Tuned to any sounds out of the ordinary, Q picked up speed when he heard the beginnings of a fight back where he had come from, the thugs shoving through ecstatic dancers with little regard to their rhythm or direction of movement. Looking back was a fool’s game, temping as it was: Q knew well what was behind him and was more concerned with what he might find in front.

There were stairs in the back of the main room that lead up to a series of private rooms and a wrap around balcony; it turned hairpin sharp halfway up and Q had hopes that if he could vanish around that turn he would vanish entirely from his pursuers’ awareness. This in mind, Q threw himself up the stairs and around the corner and slammed directly into the chest of someone built almost exactly like a slab of marble and nothing like a living being.

“Fuck—!” Q swore in fluent Russian as the man grabbed him by the wrist to prevent him from falling down the stairs in an undignified heap.

“Fuck,” he repeated, looking up into faintly amused and wildly blue eyes. Behind the man holding him up was another man carved from what could only have been the same chunk of marble by the looks of it.

All three of them looked at Q’s wrist at the same time—or, more precisely, at the handcuffs that dangled from it that had been hidden by his sleeves until this moment.

Q, to his endless dismay, flushed hotly. Fortunately, the men— his agents, _his agents_ his mind provided giddily—were looking over his head into the main club rather than at his slow immolation.

“Having some trouble?” one of them—both of them? Q had no idea, he was dealing with more important things right now—asked, also in Russian, sounding entirely too entertained by Q’s misfortune.

“I wasn’t until a moment ago,” Q griped, pulling uselessly at his hand. The green-eyed one—he wished he knew their names, hadn’t looked it up—raised his brows and looked pointedly (with interest?) at the cuff around Q’s wrist again. Q scowled deeply in return.

“Need help?” That was definitely Blue-eyes, who seemed to be tracking something over Q’s head. Hopefully the thugs who were after him and not some pretty thing on the dance floor, as Q himself was rather unable to at the moment.

“Depends on what your _help_ looks like,” Q narrowed his eyes suspiciously and yanked on his arm hard. Blue-eyes looked startled, as if he’d not noticed Q’s escape attempts up until now. He still didn’t let go.

“Well, that sounds like something we’d have to get out of here to discuss properly,” Green-eyes said in an entirely too reasonable tone of voice. It gave away his mischief just by being so believable. Q had a sudden and very intense flash into a future where he was deeply frustrated by that voice.

Blue-eyes hummed his agreement and turned to head back up the stairs, hauling Q along with him.

“Hey—wait—let me go!—” Q sputtered, hastily grabbing his glasses with his free hand before they fell off his face. Green eyes was somehow behind him now, almost close enough to be touching, hustling him along just in case Blue-eyes grip was not enough to motivate.

They weren’t even pretending to listen to his protests. Q gave up resisting and grabbed the back of Blue-eyes jacket to improve his balance. Between the two of them—literally—Q found himself hustled out of the club proper and into a shockingly quiet back hall. They clearly knew where they were going; Q had no idea this was even here, having only a vague notion of private back rooms somewhere in the club. Around another corner was an emergency exit marked out with a glowing sign.

Blue-eyes pushed through it without even hesitating. Q flinched minutely in expectation of the club’s alarm system going off, but no such thing happened. Behind him, Green-eyes laughed, presumably at Q.

Q spared a hand to flip him off over his shoulder, a move which only served to provoke more laughter.

The alley behind the club was dirty and utterly dark and freezing. To be fair to the club, most of Russia was utterly dark and freezing at this time of year, but the dirty was all inner-city charm.

“Who’d you piss off?” Blue-eyes asked suddenly, eying the end of the alley with calculation.

“…No one,” Q said sullenly. His wrist hurt. Getting out of the cuffs had left him with what would be a brilliant ring of bruises (likely not visible from under the thick bands on his bindings) and being yanked through the club had not helped matters in the least.

Blue eyes flicked a flat look in Q’s direction. Q affected a defiant look that was hindered by the fact that one of his eyes was rapidly turning purple and hurt. In the dark he doubted they could see his face clearly, but Q could feel it and it turned his look rather pathetic in the end. He startled at Green-eyes’ hand around his free wrist like a vice, now totally trapped.

“So you’ll be fine with going back in?” Green-eyes asked and Q could hear the smirk in his voice. “Since no one’s after you, of course.”

Q glared, pulled at both of his wrists just to see what would happen—which was both hands tightening to the point of pain as if they were one being instead of two—and then heaved a heavy sigh. “Local mob,” he admitted grudgingly. “Can we get out of here before they catch up?”

Neither of his captors so much as twitched in the direction of _out of here_.

“What’d you do?” Blue-eyes asked, and what was this, high stakes twenty questions?

“Stole something for them, okay!” Q hissed. “Well. Stole something twice—once for them, and once more myself. I thought it would be, uh, wasted on its intended buyer. _Can we go_?”

Apparently satisfied with what they heard, they hauled Q down the alley and away from the club without once letting go of his wrists.

 

Without consulting Q, his agents had taken him to their hotel room after about an hour of dizzying counter-pursuit methods, taking taxis and shortcuts and longcuts and public transportation around the city to ensure they were not followed by anyone. Between the two of them, Q always had one hand or another on his person ensuring that he could not bolt at any opportune moment.

Q was freezing and damp with sweat at the same time, a combination he rather resented having to experience, while his two agents seemed utterly unbothered by the weather and running both.

In the clear light of their hotel room they were even more beautiful to Q’s eyes; he shook his arms out pointedly, flexing his wrists to check for anything worse than the bruising already present, and sighed happily at being out of the night’s frigidity.

“The two of you don’t do things in half-measures,” Q said with a grin, humming with the high of a close-cut escape. “When I said we should go I kinda thought of hiding in a different club, but this is something else.”

Warming up quickly and no longer distracted by being chased and dragged around the city, Q turned his attention to the cuffs around his wrist, stroking a finger over the locking mechanism until they opened with a click. He tossed them at Green-eyes, who caught them easily, and winked.

“They didn’t look like the kind of men who would give up the chase that easily,” Blue-eyes said, giving Q the kind of look that went down better than a shot. Q shivered again, this time not due to the cold.

They were all riding the cutting edge of adrenaline still, and Q wanted to bury himself in them. He wet his upper lip with careful deliberation, aware of their eyes on him.

“What’d you steal?” Green-eyes asked lazily, cuffs dangling thoughtfully from one hand.

Q grinned wide and triumphant. “Fabergé egg, sweet little illusion if you open it,” he admitted with no small amount of pride, and bent to dig through a pocket on the lower half of his pants. “Which they don’t actually know I got away with.” He held the egg up victoriously, turning it slowly in the light.

Blue-eyes’ eyebrows had jumped almost to his hairline and Green-eyes whistled low and appreciative. Q preened under the attention.

“I have a knack for getting in and out of places,” Q expanded on his story with relish, “little magic in my blood, you know, makes it a trick, and I’d already nicked this earlier this week for some rich something-or-another—tonight I nicked it again, but they caught me charming the safe lock and thought I was going in when I was actually on my way out.” Never mind catching his last agents, this was the most fun Q had had in a while.

“That when you get the shiner?” Blue-eyes asked, gesturing to Q’s face.

Q nodded. “And the cuffs, which aren’t usually an issue for me, but I was a little distracted by being punched in the face.”

“Can you get out of anything?” Green-eyes asked speculatively, exchanging a loaded glance with his companion.

“Pretty much,” Q shrugged, banishing thoughts about MI6 and what awaited him aggressively.

Blue-eyes, the more business-like of the two of them until this moment, turned a look that was hot like burning onto Q. “Care to prove it?” he purred, advancing on Q.

“Only if you do one thing for me first,” Q challenged, disappearing the jeweled egg back into his pocket.

“Do tell,” Green-eyes had gotten up from the couch he’d thrown himself into when they had arrived and was now much closer. Q grinned.

“Tell me your names so I know what to scream later,” he delivered without a hint of shame, holding a straight face for as long as he could before cracking with laughter.

Green-eyes laughed as well, surprised and a bit husky. “We are at your command. I’m Alec, and my lesser half here is James.”

 

“What are these?” James murmured, lips moving against the soft skin of the underside of Q’s wrist.

“Fuck—magic tattoos, get me in more trouble than out—fuck, do that again—” Q gasped, back arching as Alec twisted his fingers cleverly with a low chuckle.

 

“What’re these?” Alec asked, voice rough and strained with exertion, biting the at the nape of Q’s neck as he thrust into Q. James was between Q’s legs and being _very distracting_ with his mouth—

“Magic fucking tattoos, gods, the two of you—” Q’s voice twisted off into a helpless keen as James swallowed him to the hilt, timed perfectly with Alec’s rhythm. James’ hands gripped his hips to keep Q from being able to thrust forward or back, and Alec’s hands snaked down around his ribs to bury themselves in James’ short hair, spiked with sweat. Q whined high in his throat, trapped between his agents.

 

Q lay face first into the pillow, limp and sated between James and Alec. One of them was stroking a lazy hand up and down his side, timed with Q’s breath. He wriggled slightly, just to feel the aftershocks of pleasure one more time and sighed long and deep.

“Soon as I am recovered, let’s go again,” Q informed the pillow. Teeth scraped his shoulder and someone laughed—Alec, Q thought, Alec always laughed.

“We are at your command, little beast,” James teased, echoing Alec’s words from earlier, biting the juncture of Q’s neck and shoulder. Q moaned appreciatively, then pushed at James’ head half-heartedly.

“You’re the beast, I’m not recovered yet,” Q said accusingly, because this was his agents’ fault entirely. Still, he did not try very hard to escape James’ continued attention.

Alec reached over Q’s head to swat at James. “If we’re gonna go again, which I am fully in favour of, we should nap now and chew on our new toy later,” he told James with impish amusement. Q growled his displeasure at being referred to as a ‘new toy’, pinching Alec’s side where his hand had been only resting moments before.

 

His agents asleep—or, more likely, feigning sleep and merely resting before the promised second round—Q twisted around to face the hotel ceiling, very carefully keeping his feelings off of his face.

This wasn’t exactly how he had planned to catch James and Alec, delightful as it had been—and they were caught, his to command after all.

The circle’s command in turn pushed at Q, a slow-building ache that reminded him to return _as quickly as possible_.

Q resisted, curled up in bed between James and Alec, warm and comfortable and sated and so reluctant to return to MI6. It was what he had been working for all along, true, but even as Quartermaster and given free reign over his agents it was a cage that he could not escape, not as he was now.

Returning to MI6 also meant his agents finding out about his various deceptions, some more serious than others.

This was not how Q had planned to catch James and Alec.

 

It took thirty minutes from the moment his agents were his in truth for the binding to press too harshly into Q, forcing him to fill his promise to MI6 and the circle.

“Time to go,” Q whispered regretfully, a hand on both of his agents, and _pulled_.

The seals down Q’s spine roared to life and he arched like a bow against the bed, stifling a scream as best he could. The room lit up like it was mid-afternoon, light pouring out of Q’s eyes and from each moon and off his skin where the magic could not be properly contained. Q whimpered, feeling for a moment as though he were going to fly apart or maybe stop existing on the physical plane, his skin too tight and too small to possibly contain the thirteen agents and Q himself—

But he had known this was coming, known what to expect as each agent was subsumed beneath their seal, and Q rode out the shock waves best he could, gasping and biting his pillow, fists clenched and jaw creaking.

This was what Q had been made for, almost literally, and he would not fail now.

It took less time than he expected. The seals calmed, softening to a low whisper that felt to Q as if it were coming from everywhere at once. The bindings on Q, however, only tightened further, choke-chain collar being yanked from thousands of kilometres away.

Alone-but-not-alone, Q traveled as quickly as he knew how back to MI6, every step dogged with the threat of unthinkable pain if he deviated so much as a step from what the bindings demanded of Q.

Now the game Q was playing would began in earnest.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In my very original outline for this story, everything up to this point was encapsulated in 'Q becomes Quartermaster and catches his agents'
> 
> The rest of the outline was about a page long
> 
> TIME FOR PLOT TO HAPPEN
> 
> Also: ugh, I feel pretty confident with Q but James & Alec not so much. It's okay. I can do this! I can write them realistically. Hopefully. With practice I gotta get there, right?


	7. Fine Print

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Q returns his agents to MI6 and everyone is a little unhappy.

Q sat in the chair across from M’s desk, keeping his expression neutral as the circle argued around him. Apparently they had not expected his journey around the world collecting MI6’s rogue agents to take the two months that it had and, with the exception of Mallory himself who had at least been in limited contact with Q, were spooked enough by Q’s absence to want to renegotiate things.

Q was not open to renegotiation.

“Pardon me,” Q interrupted something particularly inane that Johann had been saying—he didn’t care, it didn’t take long in the circle’s illustrious company to ascertain the hierarchy of things— “but I cannot just _hold_ the agents in their seals indefinitely simply because you are uncertain of their loyalty.” He deliberately did not address the questions aimed at his own loyalty, which were foolish bluster at best and sheer ignorance at worst, especially coming from a group of people who had written the very bindings that would guarantee his loyalty rather absolutely.

All eyes on Q now, he folded his hands demurely in his lap. “In fact, I rather doubt I can hold the agents much longer than a few hours more; as I am now, it is quite difficult to keep them contained.” From the corner of his eye Q definitely saw M twitch in an annoyed fashion. Served him right for allowing the discussion to get so out of hand.

“They won’t be happy when you release them,” Moneypenny observed archly. Several of the circle looked perturbed at the prospect of being in the same room as thirteen unhappy agents. Q shot her a look before quickly smoothing out his expression.

“They may not be happy with _me_ ,” Q emphasized, gesturing at himself to make the point, “but they are still some of England’s finest and will not cause trouble for you on that front.” He leaned forward, pushing his glasses up more securely, and tapped the small stack of files that was on M’s desk. “These are but a part of the reports and intel that the 00-agents gathered while technically not under MI6 command. The rest are back in my branch, being processed by techs as we speak.”

All of which was mostly true. The reports had been written by Q himself over the course of the two months in his down time between chasing agents, and the intel was mostly gathered by the agents. Even if they had not realized at the time that they were gathering intel. Or, at least, adjacent to intel gathering. That didn’t matter: what mattered was that Q had not just the agents back under MI6 control, but that they arguably had never left MI6 control in the first place.

The circle would do well to focus the brunt of their mistrust on Q and not his agents, and he had taken several steps to ensure that would be the case.

“Speaking of your role in the double-oh program,” Mycroft spoke up from the window, turning like a shark. Q refused to show his brief flicker of nerves. “I think it best that the agents do not know of your… situation, or the conditions of your employment at MI6.”

Well, that was a nice way of putting it. At least Mycroft was a force of nature enough to quell C, who had looked about to speak up again.

“I agree,” Mallory nodded at Mycroft. “It would not due to muddy the line of command or duty by giving the agents reason not to trust you, Q.”

“Or think that they can use the Quartermaster to escape again,” C threw in, a touch of nastiness in his voice. His dislike of Q was different from R’s superstitious—and rather well-founded—fear.

“Q has already said they were not leaving in the first place, C, let’s wait before drawing that particular doomsday conclusion,” Moneypenny said, dry as a bone.

“If MI6 is going to keep using the double-oh program, we need to have a better way of tracking the agents than their own whims or the whims of the Quartermaster,” C folded his arms and glared at Moneypenny. He had previously made some noise about the circle presenting a unified front to Q and obviously did not appreciate being contradicted.

“I agree,” Mycroft said mildly, ignoring Q in favour of pinning M with a stare. “If we had been able to reliably track the agents, things may have turned out differently.” Differently meaning Q would not be here, meaning Mycroft always had back up plans to his back up plans.

Q bit his tongue to keep from saying anything foolish along the lines of _you could not keep me from my agents with wild dogs_ or _this was the only way it was ever going to turn out_.

“TSS has been developing a trackable nanochip,” R said, glancing between M and Q in quick succession, as if anticipating being silenced. Q bit his tongue harder. “It gets injected into the bloodstream, so it can’t be removed by force or damaged in combat. We’re still in the testing stages, but it can’t hurt to do live testing with the double-ohs.”

“Is it compatible with the kinds of magic the double-oh agents play with?” C asked, looking as if he would have preferred chipping the agents himself.

R lifted her chin, more confident at such a blatant challenge of her abilities as both an engineer and magic worker. “It is compatible with whatever magic you care to throw at it,” she informed C with a steely edge. “Including whatever chaos the double-oh agents are at the base of.”

“Better chip them soon as the Quartermaster releases them, then, before they have a chance to run off,” Johann said sarcastically.

Q stood, abruptly tiring of the endlessly circular argument. “That will not be necessary,” he told the circle brusquely. “I have arranged for one of the interrogation rooms to be cleared so that those of you who do not wish to reveal yourselves to the double-oh agents may still be present behind the glass while we debrief. TSS will take care of the tracking issues after, courtesy of R. Shall we?”

M stood as well, and that seemed to be the signal the rest of the circle had been waiting on to finally take action.

 

Standing at the centre of the emptied interrogation room, M and Moneypenny stationed at the door, Q took a deep breath, feeling the stretch deeper than his bones as the agents shifted lazily in his blood. Held by the seals, they were not conscious in any sense of the word, but Q was still aware of them nudging against his body and mind like something roiling up from the deep.

Q was not afraid of letting his agents out before the circle’s eyes, confident they would adjust to the abrupt change in circumstances and power as quickly as they did any other challenge, though he was hoping it would go more smoothly than not. Much of the story he had sold to the circle painted the agents as less chaotic than they actually were; the MI6 contingent clearly knew Q was polishing things up, but everyone knew that the agents were barely contained forces of nature at the best of times, and these were decidedly not those.

Fully aware that he was stalling at this point, Q sighed heavily, tucked his hands into his pockets, and just—let the agents out.

After the pain and euphoria of catching his agents, releasing them was almost a letdown—Q felt rather suddenly as if he had let out a breath held too long, both relieved and empty all at once. His agents stood in a perfect circle with Q at the centre, which was a touch of theatrics that had to be written in the seals somewhere as that had not been his intent. Over by the door, Moneypenny was choking very quietly, as if containing a gasp or a laugh.

Q held his head high and let the moment stretch to almost unbearable tension as every single one of his agents refamiliarized themselves with reality and Q at the centre of it all. Just as someone swore softly behind him—Alec, Q would bet—Q spoke.

“Agents, I’m your new Quartermaster.”

“You must be joking,” someone behind Q muttered, disbelieving and annoyed. That would be James. Q refused to let it get to him.

“Ms. Moneypenny you all know, and with her is your new M,” Q continued smoothly, stepping to the side to allow Mallory to join him in the circle. To his credit, M did not appear ruffled in the slightest, only slightly cool in his control as he followed Q’s nonverbal cues.

M took over from there. Q stood in a very loose approximation of parade rest and endured his agent’s stares. Most were some combination of shocked edging into angry; they were also in exactly the state Q had caught them in, Vivien striking in silk and bedroom hair directly in front of him.

That must mean James and Alec were standing behind Q in nothing but skin. Moneypenny’s moment of weakness certainly made the prospect more likely. Q resisted the urge to look.

 

Mallory’s group debriefing of the double-oh agents had gone as well as it could, considering. The agents had all agreed that they had not left MI6’s service, merely gone to ground in the wake of Silva releasing double agent names onto the internet and the old M’s death. That the Quartermaster held their seals was admittedly a surprise, but not an unwelcome one, and undergoing the necessary psych evals and paperwork would be no more an issue than usual.

Q focused on his breathing and staying impassive throughout it all. While the agents were viscerally his, M was their boss and ultimately held the power, and he would not undermine the tenuous ally he had found in Mallory just to strengthen his claim on the double-ohs. Even if Q had been so inclined, at this point that may not be possible, what with his rather extended deceptions of all his agents (save Inez, who he was not thinking about).

Back in his branch, Q set to work on sorting through the intel from the last two months, hoping to get it to M sooner than later. The agents were clustered around R’s workroom where one by one she was introducing the experimental SmartBlood to their systems, having already been by their lockers and Medical to become presentable. Q was deliberately not involved in this process, not wanting anyone to suspect that he had tampered with things (especially because he was already planning to tamper with things at some point). So far, his agents had done a great deal of staring in his direction, but none had approached him. That was fine, Q told himself, he hadn’t thought they would _like_ him after all.

Just as Q thought he might actually combust under the weight of their attention, Moneypenny appeared to haul him up to M’s office—“Honestly, Q, you’re head of TSS, check your email more often.”—without so much as glancing at the returned double-ohs. She was the only one; TSS was distinctly devoid of productivity at the moment. Q took the chance to retreat without losing face gratefully.

 

Moneypenny deposited Q back in the chair in front of M’s desk and shut the door to his office firmly behind her. Q fiddled with his glasses to distract from the sensation that he was staring down a loaded gun.

“Now that you have returned with the double-ohs, we have some things we need to discuss, Quartermaster,” Mallory said, and he sounded wearier than he had all day. Q looked up, a bit startled by the familiarity in M’s voice.

“Sir?” Q asked, hesitant.

M smiled thinly. “Denbigh—that is, C—has been promoted to Joint Intelligence head. Given the upheaval of recent events, the powers that be decided that perhaps MI6 would be best served by folding us in with MI5. C is heading that task.”

Eyes narrowing, Q’s mind raced forward over the disturbing implications of that alone but gestured for M to continue. C had proved himself to be strongly against both the double-ohs and Q himself many times, and to have him in a position of oversight would likely be a thorn in Q’s side, eternally pricking.

“That was last month,” M’s voice dropped with frustration, speaking volumes to the protest he had likely put up, but Mallory was too new to being M, to MI6; maybe Olivia could have stopped the merger, but if Olivia were still alive it would also not have been an issue. “Just last week, C and his team also announced that they were heading the UK arm of an international project built to observe and collect data on all magic users and magical entities, dubbed ‘Nine Eyes’.”

Q snorted disbelievingly before he could stop himself. “That’s not just stupid, it’s not possible,” he informed M without a hint of uncertainty. This explained C’s intensity around chipping the agents, however—he really had wanted to do it himself.

“I felt that might be the case,” M nodded, but did not sound assured by Q’s evaluation of the situation. “But C is very confident in himself and the project. It is still being put to vote, but he seemed sure it would be voted through. He also seemed very inspired by the bindings we placed on you, the ones that allow us to keep track of you, and wants to explore that avenue with R. Extensively.”

Stopping himself from reaching up to finger one of the rings in his ear, Q frowned. “I mean—yes, it works on me, but it took seven of you and I agreed and I’m just one person. That is nowhere near as complex as tracking _everyone_. There’s no way.” To say nothing of how those who were not human would take such a thing: badly, and with much violence. Things old and other tended to guard their privacy jealously.

“C has said he will be putting R on the project permanently, and I’m afraid he now has the authority to do so. He has also requested that you be kept far away from it,” M softened his statement as much as he could, but Q still jerked back as if stung.

“He can’t just—requisition R—she’s second in TSS! She may not like me, but I will need her!” Q protested, then blinked, and barreled on. “Not to mention the ethical implications of—just tracking everyone with any sort of magic!”

M raised his brows, obviously questioning Q’s sense of priorities, and Q waved a hand at him to dismiss it—he had been human for hardly any time at all, and could hardly be held to any sense of morality or ethics before then.

“I did not bring you in here to argue about this, Q,” M warned. “I am letting you know how things are going to be now that you are back, and telling you to watch your step. Gods know why, but I am choosing to trust you here. If you mess up in your branch or with the double-ohs it stands to reflect back on a lot more than just you.”

Q narrowed his eyes and clenched his jaw mulishly. “You can trust me, you made me this way,” he muttered, flicking a broad gesture at himself. “I am your Quartermaster and I will do my duty.”

“Even if the double-oh program is dissolved?” M asked mildly. Q’s head whipped up to stare incredulously at him, speechless with nasty surprise and disbelief.

“No, don’t worry about that—yet,” Mallory held his hands up and appeared to be fighting a smile at having gotten one over on Q. “I am still head of MI6 and have a great deal of say in how we operate our affairs. The data you sent helped, and while it may come up again later, the double-oh program is safe for now.”

Q pressed his lips together, considering his next words carefully. “While I am your Quartermaster, sir,” he began slowly, deliberately holding M’s gaze. “I think we will both run into complications should the double-oh program be dissolved.”

M inclined his head gravely, acknowledging the unspoken warning and threat in Q’s words. “Run your branch and our agents like a tight ship, Q, and it won’t become an issue again.”

Pinching the bridge of his nose underneath his glasses, Q huffed a wry laugh. “Yes, sir,” he said with helpless amusement, having just been told his branch was not fully his and knowing the agents were a bag of angry cats he was going to have to deal with sooner rather than later.

“Anything else you wish to discuss, Q?” M asked, clearly dismissing Q.

“Actually,” Q leaned forward, hand dropping from his face, “there is. I’ve been looking over the events leading up to M’s death, and there has to be at least one inside man. I want your permission to go on a mole hunt.” He felt quite proud of how level his voice stayed throughout, not a hint of what Q would actually like to do bleeding through (though it did involve a lot of things bleeding through, a thought that gave Q a great deal of pleasure).

Mallory sighed deeply and sat back. “Gods. Of course. All right, you have my permission, but you are too new and too at risk here—everything you find, you run through me or Moneypenny and I’ll take care of it. Understood?”

Q flashed a disturbing smile. “Understood, sir.”

M groaned into his hands, then gestured for Q to kindly get the fuck out of his office and go give someone else a headache.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hah, got the next chapter in today as was my goal!
> 
> I know it's not much action here, but there were THINGS that needed setting up & dealing with.
> 
> We'll probs be getting some agents (read: James and Alec!) making trouble next chapter <3


	8. Something to do

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> James and Alec terrorize Q-branch; Q finds them something to occupy themselves with.

A week into being Quartermaster of MI6 for real, Q had a to do list that was literal kilometres long and he was doing everything in his power to arrange it such that _get 007 and 006 back in the field_ was at the very top of the list.

“Put that down, 006,” Q snapped without looking over at the agent in question, just knowing from the slightly distressed noises coming from one of his tech minions—gods, Q hoped they never found out he thought of them that way—that someone was up to something, and 007 was standing like a shadow at the corner of Q’s vision so it had to be his better half.

Worse half at the moment, Q thought uncharitably, though he did enjoy the warmth of vindication at the metallic clatter of several grenades being returned to a worktable. There had been no sound when his agent had picked them up, so Q took it to be the precursor to much more dangerous irritation.

“Thank you,” Q said, dry as a bone and twice as disinterested. He was also emailing M with a desperate plea dressed in a formal request for a mission—any mission—to give to the last two in house agents.

Everyone else had been cleared by psych and medical a few days into their sudden return to MI6. Q had arranged thing such that those who could pick back up their previous missions did and given M a tall stack of files that needed immediate licensed-to-kill attention, a not so subtle suggestion that he give new assignments to everyone remaining.

Which did not, apparently, include 006 and 007, who had rather spectacularly failed their psych evals and were given mandatory two week bereavement leave, of all things. Q did not doubt at all that they were grieving—the tap he had on the agents’ emotions gave that dead away from the start, though now that everyone was back in MI6 he had the connections as muted as he could—but he was also quite sure that this, whatever the hell they were doing, was not a manifestation of that grief.

On the other hand, they were giving Q all kinds of grief and not for the first time he spent a few moments of his time intensely contemplating killing them. M had been entirely unhelpful, putting on a sympathetic face to hide the fact that he was a monster who didn’t care for Q or his branch’s troubles in the slightest and telling Q to take advantage of having two double-oh agents on hand to run tests on weapons and other gear.

Run tests.

In one week, Alec and James had gotten up to the following nonsense:

One: dismantled every new gun Q had been overseeing the manufacturing of, without his noticing until they were all in pieces around the gun lab, claiming that they only meant to ‘help’ and were looking for ‘flaws’ in Q’s design—as if there were any— as he had only been Quartermaster for—how long had he been Quartermaster, Q? Only the two and a half months since M’s death, or had he been hidden away somewhere in the labyrinth that was MI6’s staffing? Q had gathered up the pieces of a dismembered gun in a scandalized huff and squirreled them away somewhere safe to be repaired later. He did not answer his agents’ oh-so-innocent line of questions.

Two: stolen all of Q’s personal favourite tools and hidden them in other engineer’s toolboxes, resulting in a perhaps disproportionate amount of chaos as Q, having finally found time to start fixing his poor guns, was not able to find his screwdrivers. Locating the first of several missing tools on poor Banh’s workbench may have resulted in Q yelling about respecting personal tools and get your own oh my gods the form was not hard to fill out—before realizing that a certain pair of someone’s were laughing in the background and that poor Banh very likely was not at fault.

Q turned his head as far as he could over his shoulder like a hungry owl—he would deny that it hurt to do so if anyone asked, that was not the point—and hissed “I will find someone with a gun in one piece to shoot you,” with a vehemence that did not shock his minions near as much as Q felt it should.

That his branch was warming to their new Quartermaster much faster than anyone anticipated, especially with R and her well-meant but ultimately distracting distrust of Q busy elsewhere, had escaped Q’s notice thus far. Q was vicious and deeply willing to be petty over perceived slights from a startling array of enemies (the accounting branch printers to the last unfortunate soul to aim a gun at one of his agents covered the possible spectrum well) and was quickly earning the loyalty of a group of people who were, unfortunately for anyone else involved, similarly deranged.

James and Alec had adopted near flawless _who, me?_ expressions that held until Q forcibly removed them from his branch.

Behind his vengeful back, Q’s ever-more-devoted minions watched with appropriate levels of awe, which Q missed entirely, and James and Alec observed with avid interest.

Three: slipped back into Q-branch in the dead of night to break in to Q’s personal files, which were slender to the point of nonexistence, and left the evidence on the screen for Q to find the next morning. He wasn’t sure what they had been after besides an insatiable need to know things about their new Quartermaster without ever deigning to just ask Q, but he did decide that he was very annoyed that they had just left the file open for the gods and everyone to see.

Not that anyone besides Q himself did see, as he was always the first one in and out of his branch—there were precious few other places for him to be, after all—but it was the principle of the matter. He ignored the fact that even if his agents did get around to asking he would either want or be obligated to lie.

Q changed all of 006 and 007’s MI6 passcodes in a fit of tit-for-tat, reasoning that altering their own personnel files to reflect their mental ages rather than actual ages was drawing too close to the line for M to tolerate if he caught wind of it. Passcode security, on the other hand, was one of the new MI6 mottos, implemented by Q with the wrath of someone who knows all too well what the entire psych department used to have as their password.

(It had been ‘1password’. Q hated them. They probably had something to do with M’s death. He had already made a note to follow up on that.)

Four: ‘requisitioned’ four boxes of inanely expensive semi-explosive distance rounds and ‘tested’ all four boxes as per M’s suggestion and driving the girl actually supposed to test them to hysterical tears. Q understood; she hadn’t slept in two and a half days according to Q-branch cameras and personnel tracking and she was the primary engineer on the project and her funding was going to get cut if she couldn’t get them from semi-explosive all the way up to explosive.

James had been very complimentary, standing a hair too close to Q’s minion to comfort her in her time of need and assure her that her rounds had been brilliant, defunding them clearly meant that the politicians had no appreciation of proper fieldwork and were fools besides, and that she probably needed a drink to make herself feel better, and didn’t James just know of the perfect place. Behind all that nonsense, Alec was listing increasingly creative ways to improve the rounds’ (and, eventually, the gun itself’s) explodability.

Reasonable girl that she was, she—Miranda?—only cried harder, at that point attracting Q’s less than benevolent attention.

Q told Miranda that she could bundle her ammo project in with Banh’s tracer round project if the two of them could get a proposal and new budget on his desk by Monday and she stopped crying, for the love of all that was sacred. Then he rounded on 006 and 007 with no small amount of glee and informed them that the good folk of Lab 4 were waiting for them in the shooting range with bulletproof armour that needed testing, hop to it.

Five, and Q was beginning to get alarmed looks from those nearest to him and someone had put a new cup of tea at the very edge of his desk like some kind of appeasement offering to an angry god so perhaps this exercise was not the best decision he had ever made but just one more his agents infuriated him so much: followed Q around like twin shadows to the point that it was now going on three days that Q had not slept in his own bed because he could not shake either one of them long enough to escape down to the pseudo-apartment M had ordered built for MI6’s captive Quartermaster. He couldn’t leave and his agents wouldn’t leave, though they had to be taking shifts sleeping somewhere, and Q was this close to snapping.

This close.

Q sipped at the appeasement tea, focusing on being calm and dignified while typing another email to M with one hand, this one informing M that if he did not get 006 and 007 out of Q’s hair he—and likely half his team—was going to need psychological leave as well, preferably until such time as the two problem agents were out of the bloody country.

It was about that point he noticed the tea was suspiciously perfect, tasting like the expensive loose leaf locked in the bottom drawer of his office desk, optimally steeped and with just the right amount of sugar in it. He turned slowly where he stood, and found James slouching attractively—arse—against the desk directly behind Q’s and looking like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth.

“Have you been in my office?” Q did not ask so much as accuse, but gave his agent the benefit of inflecting his voice like a question.

“Have you been home at all this week?” James countered smoothly. Q glared at him, the effect ruined by his white-knuckled grip on his perfect tea, held just below his chin so that it was steaming up his glasses but more importantly he could breathe it continuously.

“Have you been in my tea?!” Q would deny until his dying day the undignified squeak of outrage his voice gave on tea.

“Also,” he added tartly, “I live here now because, in case you have failed to notice, the last MI6 headquarters blew up due to holes in our security and such things do not just fix themselves, which you specifically are not making any easier.”

James tilted his head to the side curiously, as if he were listening to something other than what Q was saying.

“What are you?” James asked bluntly. Q stuttered for a moment, then drew himself up and glared over his still-fogged glasses.

“Your Quartermaster or none of your business, take you pick,” he said acerbically.

James smiled like Q had actually given him an answer. “So you are something,” he said with a satisfied note in his voice.

Q sighed and shook his head. “If it gets you out of my hair, I’ll be whatever you want, 007.”

“If I get him out of your hair, will you be whatever I want?” Alec appeared out of nowhere to sling his arm around Q’s shoulders, exchanging smirks with James.

Q was giving him ten seconds before resorting to some light stabbing.

“I will call Moneypenny down here to shoot you both,” he groused, ducking down to escape Alec’s hold and set determinedly into ignoring them both and getting some work done.

 

Q took his lunches on the roof of MI6.

Which was to say: Q took a box of cigarettes to the farthest edge of MI6 the bindings on him would allow, just at the point it was almost too much to handle, and chain smoked until someone—most often Moneypenny—was sent to check on him. After the initial box of cigarettes, liberated from one of the security guards, ran out Q switched to rolling his own with an odd blend of herbs and tobacco that smelled faintly of temple incense. He probably should eat; the form he was bound in required it eventually, if not as often as most people. Tea and temple smoke only went so far.

The first time it happened, Moneypenny had held a gun on Q. He had spared her a slightly derisive glance, sucked his cigarette down to the filter, and pushed against the boundary only he could feel to hold the butt out over the edge of the building and flick it out to the street below. Even that, no real intent to escape behind it, left his hand white and shaking. Q pulled out another cigarette with careful deliberation to hide the faint tremor and ignored Moneypenny until it was lit.

“I do get lunch breaks, do I not?” Q asked mildly around a mouthful of smoke.

Satisfied Q was only testing his leash only to prove he could and without any teeth, Moneypenny had holstered her gun and not brought it out again each time she was sent to the roof to retrieve MI6’s recalcitrant Quartermaster. By the end of the week she had started to bring fruit, insisting Q eat something other than the tea that his techs reported to be the only thing they had seen him consume. He ate said fruit with extreme reluctance under Moneypenny’s strict supervision before she bullied him back down to his branch.

They didn’t talk about it.

 

Alec blew up a storage room in Q-branch the same morning Q received a very disturbing intelligence report from 001, who was technically out on MI6 business that had the added bonus of being in pursuit of someone Q was convinced would tie Olivia’s death to a larger group.

And now it appeared he had that tie. The man Silva had tasked with stealing the drive that had contained the now-blown cover identities of so many international agents had turned back up in the company of a very undercover terrorist group—the kind of undercover that made Q rather suspect some nation’s government involvement.

After doing some digging, Cliff reported, the same organization appeared to be making a lot of anti-old magic noise along the lines of religious extremism, but stripped back the rhetoric sounded suspiciously similar to the Nine Eyes party line of safety in total nonconsensual transparency on behalf of all those more magically inclined than a goldfish.

Q wanted—no, Q needed a man inside that group. And he happened to have just the man at loose ends tormenting his branch.

 

An hour later Q, James, and Alec stood in M’s office. Q was explaining his plan to all three of them at once, mostly to refrain from repeating himself and slightly so that there were witnesses should either 007 or 006 choose to turn on him. He didn’t think they would after he explained, but the risk stood.

Q’s plan was this: there was a shadowy terrorist/possibly government organization in north Africa with indications that they might be tied to the Nine Eyes program C was so determined to implement, as well as being at least tangentially tied to the old M’s murder.

MI6 needed a man inside that organization yesterday, Q insisted.

At that point, Q turned to face the agents behind him as well as M.

“Which is why I would like to kill 006,” he stated blandly, “to give him the opportunity to infiltrate the group as a malcontented defector, abandoned after a careless mistake.”

M raised a brow over James’ and Alec’s protests—interestingly, James moreso—and gestured for Q to reach the end of the point he was so obviously dragging out.

“And I’d like 007 to do it,” Q finished with just a hint of the frankly inappropriate amount of vindication he was feeling. Terrorize him and his branch again, see what happens, go on.

James and Alec both snapped into silent, furious attention on Q. Q spread his hands, innocent as you please, and explained further.

“After the Silva debacle, we have no truly secret agents, especially if anyone goes looking. All reports indicate that this group will go looking. So what we need is a double agent, but it has to be convincing—with all the housecleaning I’m doing right now, I would catch anyone before they could get out alive.” Q smiled benignly at Alec.

“Dead, on the other hand, MI6 could hardly be expected to keep tabs on. And it has to be rather publicly dead, I’m afraid, no dark of night backstabs”

“Q,” M warned with the patience of someone well used to the kind of theatrics Q could get up to. Q did not pout about it.

“001 reports that the man who stole the original drive will be on a train in Morocco next week. I propose that we send 006 and 007 after him for retrieval and interrogation, but in the chaos, 007 shoots 006—and it appears to be fatal.” Q held up a hand to stop James from interrupting. “I want to send you in as well, 007, but from a different angle, after we get 006 on the inside.”

Alec shifted his weight back. “I would be pretty pissed if you shot me, Jamesy,” he admitted. “Given your aim, there’s no way it’d be an accident, even if everyone else thought it was. Might be pissed enough to defect if you left me for dead after, too.”

James was glaring equally at Q and M—who was looking fairly sold on Q’s plan—and now he directed that glare at Alec for agreeing to go along with it. “I don’t like this,” he protested, though clearly had no real ground to fight from.

“You don’t have to like it, 007,” M told him. “You just have to do it.”

 

A week later, James shot Alec off a train.

 

007 swore blisteringly into Q’s ear the whole time, which while a reasonable reaction to ‘accidentally’ shooting a fellow agent instead of their target, was very distracting to Q. Alec’s earpiece had been destroyed early in the fight, cutting him off from Q-branch support; that really had been an accident now turned blessing in disguise as Q did not have to listen to his agent very convincingly fake his own death.

The very convincing aspect of Alec’s performance was in no small part because being shot off the train had not been part of the plan—but with the train disappearing into a tunnel James would not be able to get around in time, they had been out of options. Q was now very focused on what he could feel of Alec through his seal and mitigating the damage as much as he could from such a distance.

James was a faint buzz at the back of Q’s mind, the rest of his attention taken up by a violently dissociative feeling of being in two places at once, overlapped and echoing his own pain against his agent’s.

Q dimly hoped that Alec was not experiencing this the same way he was, as that would be too revealing of things Q would rather kept secret—the bindings on him did not like whatever it was he was doing and were making themselves quite painfully known. Ironically, it was the same pain that held him captive that pulled Q back into himself, gasping faintly and glancing around to see if anyone had noticed.

“Nobody panic,” Q announced, shocked at how steady his voice was, “006 is still alive. 007, do not under any circumstances pursue him.”

The rest of his techs—and M, overseeing the death of one of his agents—were paying rapt attention to the visual cover Q had managed to get of the scene. Taking a moment to be grateful for the distraction, Q slipped into his office and locked the door before gingerly pulling his coat and shirt off.

His left shoulder was bleeding sluggishly from what looked to be a much less serious echo of the hole that had to be in Alec’s shoulder, and without looking Q could feel his entire back like a giant bruise. Already, Q was healing; wiping at the blood on his chest with the ruined shirt, the pseudo bullet hole appeared to be closed, or at the very least not bleeding anymore, and his ribs were letting incrementally larger breaths back into his lungs.

Satisfied he would not bleed through his clothes or anything equally revealing, Q retrieved a spare shirt from his desk and redressed quickly, hoping to get back to his station before anyone noticed his absence.

Q leapt nearly out of his skin as James growled with barely-banked fury into his ear, "You better hope you know what you’re doing, Q."

That rather was the crux of the matter, wasn’t it, Q thought with only a trace of hysteria. “You will have to trust me, 007,” he said, in that same shockingly steady tone. “As well as Alec.”

James made a choked-off snarl on the other end of Q’s earpiece and then the line went dead with a depressing crunch that meant another piece of Q’s equipment would not be coming home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> okay, y'all, I seriously almost ended this chapter with _A week later, James shot Alec off a train._
> 
> 'cause
> 
> you know that thing old television shows used to do where they cut to commercial after a TERRIBLE HOW-WILL-THEY-EVER-RESOLVE-THIS CLIFFHANGER and then when they come back from the break they reshoot the same scene but differently so it's clear how they were gonna resolve it the whole time?
> 
> I almost did that but the writing version, which is terrible and tacky and bad writing besides
> 
> thank my mom, she talked me out of it
> 
> also, uh, while this is... mostly... in line with the plot, it's not how I intended to do it? so? HOPEFULLY IT GOES WELL, GUYS, this is uncharted-ish territory
> 
> I'm really enjoying a lot of the character inversion in this fic tho xD
> 
> EDIT: Also- real talk. Should I tag this for self harm? I just reread this chapter & realized Q's got like... a lot of self-harm tendencies coming out, even if they don't hurt him as badly as they might someone else. IDK

**Author's Note:**

> A few things:
> 
> 1) I am terminally bad at tagging, and sincerely request suggestions on what would be best to tag this with as I go. Please. Save me from my ineptitude
> 
> 2) If you're reading this, Only_1_Truth, hi! also sorry, this is not so much for you like a gift but for you in the sense that it's inspired by like... seven or eight of your works & not just one && I sorta crashed when I tried to pick one to put as the inspired-by and this is my compromise b/c credit where credit is due for inspiration
> 
> 3) I have a few chapters written and the whole thing outlined but my executive function is deeply, deeply broken and I would appreciate feedback as we go to distract it from the fact that I am gonna trick it into _actually doing something oh my god_
> 
> 4) Title and description are working and subject to change gods what is wrong with me x.x


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